Scales of Justice (24 page)

At this point in Alleyn’s meditations, George himself, looking huffily postprandial, walked, in. His expression was truculent.

“I
should
have thought, I
must
say, Alleyn,” he said, “that one’s luncheon hour at least might be left to one.”

“I’m sorry,” Alleyn said, “I thought you’d finished. Do you smoke between the courses, perhaps?”

Lacklander angrily pitched his cigarette into the fireplace. “I wasn’t hungry,” he said.

“In that case I am relieved that I didn’t, after all, interrupt you.”

“What are you driving at? I’m damned if I like your tone, Alleyn. What do you want?”

“I want,” Alleyn said, “the truth. I want the truth about what you did yesterday evening. I want the truth about what you did when you went to Hammer Farm last night. I want the truth, and I think I have it, about Chapter 7 of your father’s memoirs. A man has been murdered. I am a policeman and I want facts.”

“None of these matters has anything to do with Cartarette’s death,” Lacklander said and wet his lips.

“You won’t persuade me of that by refusing to discuss them.”

“Have I said that I refuse to discuss them?”

“All right,” Alleyn sighed. “Without more ado, then, did you expect to find a copy of Chapter 7 when you broke open the drawer in Colonel Cartarette’s desk last night?”

“You’re deliberately insulting me, by God!”

“Do you deny that you broke open the drawer?”

Lacklander made a small gaping movement with his lips and an ineffectual gesture with his hands. Then, with some appearance of boldness he said, “Naturally, I don’t do anything of the sort. I did it by — at the desire of his family. The keys seemed to be lost and there were certain things that had to be done — people to be told and all that. She didn’t even know the name of his solicitors. And there were people to ring up. They thought his address book might be there.”

“In the locked drawer? The address book?”

“Yes.”

“Was it there?”

He boggled for a moment and then said, “No.”

“And you did this job before we arrived?”

“Yes.”

“At Mrs. Cartarette’s request?”

“Yes.”

“And Miss Cartarette? Was she in the search party?”

“No.”

“Was there, in fact, anything in the drawer?”

“No,” George said hardily. “There wasn’t.” His face had begun to look coarse and blank.

“I put it to you that you did not break open the drawer at Mrs. Cartarette’s request. It was you, I suggest, who insisted upon doing it because you were in a muck-sweat wanting to find out where the amended Chapter 7 of your father’s memoirs might be. I put it to you that your relationship with Mrs. Cartarette is such that you were in a position to dictate this manoeuvre.”

“No. You have no right, damn you—”

“I suggest that you are very well aware of the fact that your father wrote an amended version of Chapter 7 which was, in effect, a confession. In this version he stated firstly that he himself was responsible for young Ludovic Phinn’s suicide and secondly that he himself had traitorously conspired against his own government with certain elements in the German Government. This chapter, if it were published, would throw such opprobrium upon your father’s name that in order to stop its being made public, I suggest, you were prepared to go to the lengths to which you have, in fact, gone. You are an immensely vain man with a confused, indeed a fanatical sense of your family prestige. Have you anything to say to all this?”

A tremor had begun to develop in George Lacklander’s hands. He glanced down at them and with an air of covering up a social blunder, thrust them into his pockets. Most unexpectedly he began to laugh, an awkward, rocketing sound made on the intake of breath, harsh as a hacksaw.

“It’s ridiculous,” he gasped, hunching his shoulders and bending at the waist in a spasm that parodied an ecstacy of amusement. “No, honestly, it’s too much!”

“Why,” Alleyn asked sedately, “are you laughing?”

Lacklander shook his head and screwed up his eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he gasped. “Frightful of me, I know, but really!” Alleyn saw that through his almost sealed eyelids he was peeping out, wary and agitated. “You don’t mean to say you think that I—?” He waved away his uncompleted sentence with a flap of his pink freckled hand.

“That you murdered Colonel Cartarette, were you going to say?”

“Such a notion! I mean, how? When? With what?”

Alleyn, watching his antics, found them insupportable.

“I know I shouldn’t laugh,” Lacklander gabbled, “but it’s so fantastic. How? When? With what?” And through Alleyn’s mind dodged a disjointed jingle. “
Quomodo? Quando? Quibus auxiliis
?”

“He was killed,” Alleyn said, “by a blow and a stab. The injuries were inflicted at about five past eight last evening. The murderer stood in the old punt. As for ‘with what’—”

He forced himself to look at George Lacklander, whose face, like a bad mask, was still crumpled in a false declaration of mirth.

“The puncture,” Alleyn said, “was made by your mother’s shooting-stick and the initial blow—” he saw the pink hands flex and stretch, flex and stretch—“by a golf-club. Probably a driver.”

At that moment the desk telephone rang. It was Dr. Curtis for Alleyn.

He was still talking when the door opened and Lady Lacklander came in followed by Mark. They lined themselves up by George and all three watched Alleyn.

Curtis said, “Can I talk?”

“Ah yes,” Alleyn said airily. “That’s all right. I’m afraid I can’t do anything to help you, but you can go ahead quietly on your own.”

“I suppose,” Dr. Curtis’s voice said very softly, “you’re in a nest of Lacklanders?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“All right. I’ve rung up to tell you about the scales. Willy can’t find both types on any of the clothes or gear.”

“No?”

“No. Only on the rag: the paint-rag.”

“Both types on that?”

“Yes. And on the punt seat.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Shall I go on?”

“Do.”

Dr. Curtis went on. Alleyn and the Lacklanders watched each other.

Nurse Kettle had finished her afternoon jobs in Swevenings, but before she returned to Chyning, she thought she should visit the child with the abscess in the gardener’s cottage at Hammer Farm. She felt some delicacy about this duty because of the calamity that had befallen the Cartarettes. Still, she could slip quietly round the house and down to the cottage without bothering anybody, and perhaps the gardener’s wife would have a scrap or two of mournful gossip for her about when the funeral was to take place and what the police were doing and how the ladies were bearing up and whether general opinion favoured an early marriage between Miss Rose and Dr. Mark. She also wondered privately what, if anything, was being said about Mrs. Cartarette and Sir George Lacklander, though her loyalty to The Family, she told herself, would oblige her to give a good slap down to any nonsense that was talked in
that
direction.

Perhaps her recent interview with Commander Syce had a little upset her. It had been such a bitter and unexpected disappointment to find him at high noon so distinctly the worse for wear. Perhaps it was disappointment that had made her say such astonishingly snappish things to him; or, more likely, she thought, anxiety. Because, she reflected as she drove up Watt’s Hill, she
was
dreadfully anxious about him. Of course, she knew very well that he had pretended to be prostrate with lumbago because he wanted her to go on visiting him, and this duplicity, she had to admit, gave her a cosy feeling under her diaphragm. But Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn would have a very different point of view about the deception; perhaps a terrifying point of view. Well, there, she thought, turning in at the Hammer Farm drive, it was no good at her age getting the flutters. In her simple snobbishness she comforted herself with the thought that “Handsome Alleyn,” as the evening papers called him, was the Right Sort, by which Nurse Kettle meant the Lacklander as opposed to the Kettle or Fox or Oliphant sort or, she was obliged to add to herself, the Kitty Cartarette sort. As this thought occurred to her, she compressed her generous lips. The memory had arisen of Commander Syce trying half-heartedly to conceal a rather exotic water-colour of Kitty Cartarette. It was a memory that, however much Nurse Kettle might try to shove it out of sight, recurred with unpleasant frequency.

By this time she was out of the car and stumping round the house by a path that ran down to the gardener’s cottage. She carried her bag and looked straight before her, and she quite jumped when she heard her name called: “Hullo, there! Nurse Kettle!”

It was Kitty Cartarette sitting out on the terrace with a tea-table in front of her. “Come and have some,” she called.

Nurse Kettle was dying for a good cup of tea, and what was more, she had a bone to pick with Kitty Cartarette. She accepted and presently was seated before the table.

“You pour out,” Kitty said. “Help yourself.”

She looked exhausted and had made the mistake of over-painting her face. Nurse Kettle asked her briefly if she had had any sleep.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “doped myself up to the eyebrows last night, but you don’t feel so good after it, do you?”

“You certainly do
not.
You want to be careful about that sort of thing, you know, dear.”

“Ah, what the hell!” Kitty said impatiently and lit a cigarette at the stub of her old one. Her hands shook. She burnt her finger and swore distractedly.

“Now, then,” Nurse Kettle said making an unwilling concession to the prompting of her professional conscience. “Steady.” And thinking it might help Kitty to talk, she asked, “What have you been doing with yourself all day, I wonder?”

“Doing? God, I don’t know. This morning for my sins I had to go over to Lacklanders’.”

Nurse Kettle found this statement deeply offensive in two ways. Kitty had commonly referred to the Lacklanders as if they were shopkeepers. She had also suggested that they were bores.

“To Nunspardon?” Nurse Kettle said with refinement. “What a lovely old home it is! A show place if ever there was one,” and she sipped her tea.

“The
place
is all right,” Kitty muttered under her breath.

This scarcely veiled slight upon the Lacklanders angered Nurse Kettle still further. She began to wish that she had not accepted tea from Kitty. She replaced her cucumber sandwich on her plate and her cup and saucer on the table.

“Perhaps,” she said, ’’you prefer Uplands.”

Kitty stared at her. “
Uplands
?” she repeated, and after a moment’s consideration she asked without any great display of interest, “Here! what are you getting at?”

“I thought,” Nurse Kettle said with mounting colour, “you might find the company at Uplands more to your taste than the company at Nunspardon.”

“Geoff Syce?” Kitty gave a short laugh. “God, that old bit of wreckage! Have a heart!”

Nurse Kettle’s face was scarlet. “If the Commander isn’t the man he used to be,” she said, “I wonder whose fault it is.”

“His own, I should think,” Kitty said indifferently.

“Personally, I’ve found it’s more often a case of
cherchez,
” Nurse Kettle said carefully, “
la femme.
”

“What?”

“When a nice man takes to solitary drinking, it’s generally because some woman’s let him down.”

Kitty looked at her guest with the momentarily deflected interest of a bitter preoccupation. “Are you suggesting I’m the woman in this case?” she asked.

“I’m not suggesting anything. But you knew him out in the East, I believe?” Nurse Kettle added with a spurious air of making polite conversation.

“Oh, yes,” Kitty agreed contemptuously. “I knew him all right. Did he tell you? Here, what
has
he told you?” she demanded, and unexpectedly there was a note of something like desperation in her voice.

“Nothing, I’m sure, that you could take exception to; the Commander, whatever you like to say,
is
a gentleman.”

“How can you be such a fool,” Kitty said drearily.

“Well, really!”

“Don’t talk to me about gentlemen. I’ve had them, thank you. If you ask me, it’s a case of the higher you go the fewer. Look,” Kitty said with savagery, “at George Lacklander.”

“Tell me this,” Nurse Kettle cried out; “did he love you?”

“Lacklander?”

“No.” She swallowed and with dignity corrected Kitty, “I was referring to the Commander.”

“You talk like a kid. Love!”

“
Honestly
!”

“Look!” Kitty said. “You don’t know anything. Face it; you don’t know a single damn’ thing. You haven’t got a clue.”

“Well, I must say! You can’t train for nursing, I’ll have you know—”

“O, well, all right. O.K. From that point of view. But from my point of view, honestly, you have no idea.”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about,” Nurse Kettle said in a worried voice.

“I bet you don’t.”

“The Commander—” She stopped short and Kitty stared at her incredulously.

“Do I see,” Kitty asked, “what I think I see! You don’t tell me you and Geoff Syce — God, that’s funny!”

Words, phrases, whole speeches suddenly began to pour out of Nurse Kettle. She had been hurt in the most sensitive part of her emotional anatomy, and her reflex action was surprising. She scarcely knew herself what she said. Every word she uttered was spoken in defence of something that she would have been unable to define. It is possible that Nurse Kettle, made vulnerable by her feeling for Commander Syce — a feeling that in her cooler moments she would have classed as “unsuitable”—found in Kitty Cartarette’s contempt an implicit threat to what Lady Lacklander had called her belief in degree. In Kitty, over-painted, knowledgeable, fantastically “not-quite,” Nurse Kettle felt the sting of implied criticism. It was as if, by her very existence, Kitty Cartarette challenged the hierarchy that was Nurse Kettle’s symbol of perfection.

“—so you’ve no business,” she heard herself saying, “you’ve no business to be where you are and behave the way you’re behaving. I don’t care what’s happened. I don’t care how
he
felt about you in Singapore or wherever it was. That was
his
business. I don’t care.”

Kitty had listened to this tirade without making any sign that she thought it exceptional. Indeed, she scarcely seemed to give it her whole attention but snuffed it with an air of brooding discontent. When at last Nurse Kettle ran out of words and breath, Kitty turned and stared abstractedly at her.

“I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,” she said. “Is he game to marry you?”

Nurse Kettle felt dreadful. “I wish I hadn’t said anything,” she muttered. “I’m going.”

“I suppose he might like the idea of being dry-nursed.
You’ve
nothing to moan about. Suppose I was friends with him in Singapore? What of it? Go right ahead. Mix in with the bloody county and I hope you enjoy yourself.”

“Don’t talk about them like that,” Nurse Kettle shouted.

“Don’t do it! You know nothing about them. You’re ignorant. I always say they’re the salt of the earth.”

“Do you!” With methodical care Kitty moved the tea-tray aside as if it prevented her in some way from getting at Nurse Kettle. “Listen,” she continued, holding the edges of the table and leaning forward, “listen to me. I asked you to come and sit here because I’ve got to talk and I thought you might be partly human. I didn’t know you were a yes-girl to this gang of fossils. God! You make me sick! What have they got, except money and snob-value, that you haven’t got?”

“Lots,” Nurse Kettle declaimed stoutly.

“Like hell they have! No, listen. Listen! O.K., I lived with your boy-friend in Singapore. He was bloody dull, but I was in a bit of a jam and it suited us both. O.K., he introduced me to Maurice. O.K., he did it like they do: ‘Look what I’ve found,’ and sailed away in his great big boat and got the shock of his life when he came home and found me next door as Mrs. Maurice Cartarette. So what does he do? He couldn’t care less what happened to
me,
of course, but could he be just ordinary-friendly and give me a leg up with these survivals from the ice-age? Not he! He shies off as if I was a nasty smell and takes to the bottle. Not that he wasn’t pretty expert at that before.”

Nurse Kettle made as if to rise, but Kitty stopped her with a sharp gesture. “Stay where you are,” she said. “I’m talking. So here I was. Married to a — I don’t know what — the sort they call a nice chap. Too damn’ nice for me. I’d never have pulled it off with him in Singapore if it hadn’t been he was lonely and missing Rose. He couldn’t bear not to have Rose somewhere about. He was a real baby, though, about other women: more like a mother’s darling than an experienced man. You had to laugh sometimes. He wasn’t my cup of tea, but I was down to it, and anyway, his sort owed me something.”

“O, dear!” Nurse Kettle lamented under her breath. “O, dear, dear, dear!” Kitty glanced at her and went on.

“So how did it go? We married and came here and he started writing some god-awful book and Rose and he sat in each other’s pockets and the county called. Yes, they called, all right, talking one language to each other and another one to me. Old Occy Phinn, as mad as a meat-axe and doesn’t even keep himself clean. The Fat Woman of Nunspardon, who took one look at me and then turned polite for the first time in history. Rose, trying so hard to be nice it’s a wonder she didn’t rupture something. The parson and his wife, and half a dozen women dressed in tweed sacks and felt buckets with faces like the backsides of a mule. My God, what have they
got
? They aren’t fun, they aren’t gay, they don’t
do
anything and they look like the wreck of the schooner
Hesperus.
Talk about a living death! And me! Dumped like a sack and meant to be grateful!”

“You don’t understand,” Nurse Kettle began and then gave it up. Kitty had doubled her left hand into a fist and was screwing it into the palm of the right, a strangely masculine gesture at odds with her enamelled nails.

“Don’t!” Nurse Kettle said sharply. “Don’t do that.”

“Not one of them, not a damn’ one was what you might call friendly.”

“Well, dear me, I must say! What about Sir George!” Nurse Kettle cried, exasperated and rattled into indiscretion.

“George! George wanted what they all want, and now things have got awkward, he doesn’t want that. George! George, the umpteenth baronet, is in a muck-sweat. George can’t think,” Kitty said in savage mimicry, “what people might not be saying. He told me so himself! If you knew what I know about George—” Her face, abruptly, was as blank as a shuttered house. “Everything,” she said, “has gone wrong, I just don’t have the luck.”

All sorts of notions, scarcely comprehensible to herself, writhed about in the mid-region of Nurse Kettle’s thoughts. She was reminded of seaweed in the depths of a marine pool. Monstrous revelations threatened to emerge and were suppressed by a sort of creaming-over of the surface of her mind. She wanted to go away from Kitty Cartarette before any more damage was done to her innocent idolatries and yet found herself unable to make the appropriate gestures of departure. She was held in thrall by a convention. Kitty had been talking dismally for some time, and Nurse Kettle had not listened. She now caught a desultory phrase.

“Their fault!” Kitty was saying. “You can say what you like, but whatever has happened is their fault.”

“No, no, no!” Miss Kettle cried out, beating her short scrubbed hands together. “How can you think that! You terrify me. What are you suggesting?”

“What are you suggesting?” George Lacklander demanded as Alleyn at last put down the receiver. “Who have you been speaking to? What did you mean by what you said to me just now — about—” he looked round at his mother and son—“an instrument,” he said.

Lady Lacklander said, “George, I don’t know what you and Roderick have been talking about, but I think it’s odds on that you’d better hold your tongue.”

“I’m sending for my solicitor.”

She grasped the edge of the desk and let herself down into a chair. The folds of flesh under her chin began to tremble. She pointed at Alleyn.