Thou Shell of Death (12 page)

‘By Jove, yes, you’ll have to keep your eyes open. Though it’s not impossible that this second witness might be in league with the murderer.’

‘You don’t often find conspiracy to murder, sir. Very few people would trust anyone else with a secret like that.’

‘Macbeth and his wife. Thompson and Bywaters. It’s not uncommon in cases when sexual passion is involved. And there’s a hell of a lot of sexual passion lying about in this party.’

Bleakley was pondering the sinister significance of this idea as he went into the dining room to confront his guests. No sign of it, however, appeared on his brick-red, deceptively bucolic face. No one raised any objection to a search of their bedrooms. Bleakley accordingly sent up the sergeant, who had returned from Taviston, to carry out this task; and retired with Nigel and Bolter to the little study, leaving a constable at the dining-room door to send in the guests one by one and also to pick up any illuminating bits of conversation that might be dropped there. Philip Starling was disposed of first. Mrs Grant had already deposed that Bellamy had been in and about the kitchen premises till about two-thirty, when she knocked off work for her afternoon sleep. Starling had been talking with Nigel upstairs from two-twenty till the alarm was given, and he was therefore out of it. He repeated his assertion that he knew nothing of any will: nor did he know who were O’Brien’s solicitors.

Lucilla Thrale was sent for next. She swept in and took the chair offered her at the end of the table like a queen. Bolter emitted an audible gasp of admiration, and Nigel felt that even the superintendent could scarce forbear to cheer. Lucilla met this more or less silent applause with that almost imperceptible lift of the head, that faint arrogant awareness of
lip
and eyebrow which are the beautiful woman’s acknowledgement of admiration. Bleakley fingered his stiletto-like moustache and settled his tie. He first asked the formal questions as to her age, address, etc. Then, with a rasping cough, he set to work.

‘Now, Miss Thrale, I’m sure you will not mind answering a few other questions. Bolter there’ (Bolter puffed out his already very adequate chest) ‘will take down what you say, and later you will be given a copy of the deposition and asked to sign it, if you find it correct.’

Lucilla inclined her head graciously.

‘First of all, Miss Thrale, do you wish to amplify the statement you made this morning about Mr O’Brien’s will?’

‘Amplify it? How can I?’ she said in her cool, husky, slightly insolent voice. ‘Fergus—Mr O’Brien—never spoke to me about a will.’

‘Put it this way, do you think you are likely to benefit by it?’

‘I dare say,’ she replied indifferently.

Slightly nettled, the superintendent leant forward and said:

‘What was your relationship with the deceased?’

Lucilla flushed: then threw back her magnificent head, and, looking through Bleakley rather than at him, replied:

‘I was his mistress.’

A half-strangled sound, suspiciously like ‘Cor!’ proceeded from Bolter.

‘Hrrm, hrrumph. Just so. Well now, to revert to the occurrences of last night, ma’am. You heard no suspicious sounds after you had gone to bed?’

‘I went to sleep at once. What suspicious sounds would there be?’

Nigel, crushing out his cigarette, said mildly to the superintendent, ‘I don’t think Miss Thrale realises that O’Brien was murdered.’

Lucilla’s hand flew to her mouth. She gasped. Her pale face grew paler still and seemed to shrink.

‘Murdered? Oh, God! Fergus—who?’

‘We don’t know yet. Perhaps you can tell us if he had any enemies.’

‘Enemies?’ Lucilla’s eyelids dropped: their long lashes swept down; her previous repose of attitude seemed to have tightened to a nervous immobility. ‘Such a man will always have enemies. I cannot tell you more.’

Bleakley was silent for a moment. Then he said briskly, ‘Now if you will just tell us, as a matter of form, your movements this afternoon.’

‘I was in the lounge till about three o’clock. Then I went up to my room to rest. I did not come down again till I heard the noise downstairs. It is terrible, terrible! No one is safe in this house! Who will it be next?’

‘Don’t you worry yourself, ma’am. We have the matter well in hand. Anyone with you in the lounge?’

‘Miss Cavendish sat with me for a bit after lunch. She went out before I did—about a quarter of an hour
before
. I don’t know where she went,’ Lucilla said coldly, ‘and I think Mr. Knott-Sloman looked in once. Yes, it was ten to three. He came to compare his watch with the clock.’

‘Now, just one more question, Miss Thrale, and I hope you will understand that it is merely a formal matter of cross-checking all movements. Have you any means of corroborating that you were in your room from’ (he glanced at his notes) ‘three o’clock till you heard the alarm?’

‘No, I have not,’ she said quickly and decisively—a little too quickly, as if she had anticipated the question and decided on the answer beforehand. ‘I do not have witnesses of all my movements.’

‘The loss is ours,’ murmured Nigel with impudent gallantry. Lucilla gave him a freezing look, and swept out. Knott-Sloman was summoned next. He entered jauntily, smoking a cigar, and wearing the expression half-hearty, half-ingratiating with which he welcomed visitors to his roadhouse.

‘Well, well, well,’ he said, rubbing his hands. ‘So this is the inquisition. Not so alarming as I always imagined this sort of thing to be. What we always found out at the Front—the worst part of a show was waiting for it to begin.’

He declared himself to be Cyril Knott-Sloman, age fifty-one (‘But a man’s no older than he feels, what?’), bachelor, proprietor of the Fizz-and-Frolic Club, near Kingston. He knew nothing of O’Brien’s testamentary dispositions. He did not fancy his chances as an heir
(‘Put
my money on Lucilla for the inheritance stakes; a fast mover, that filly.’). When asked whether he had heard anything during the night, he looked hard at Bleakley, then said:

‘Aha, I thought so. You gave yourself away this morning, superintendent. So you don’t think O’Brien did it himself. Well, I don’t either. He was not the fellow to take the easy way out. Poor old Slip-Slop. It’s hard to believe that he’s gone west. One of the best, he was. I wish I could help you, but I slept like a log all night long.’

‘Can you tell us any possible motive there might have been for killing O’Brien? Was he the sort of man to make enemies?’

‘Well, anyone who’s got a packet of money like that is a bit liable to dirty work, what? Damn it, I shouldn’t have said that—sounds as if I was trying to get one in at Lucilla—ridiculous, of course, the girl couldn’t kill a wasp. Forget it. Apart from that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do him in. Everyone liked him; you couldn’t help it. Though I thought he’d got a bit queer in his ways since I met him last.’

‘Where was that?’

‘Out in France. Hadn’t seen him since ’eighteen. Turned up suddenly one night last summer at my club with Lucilla.’

‘Very well, sir; now if you’ll just inform us of your movements from lunchtime today.’

Knott-Sloman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Darned difficult to remember everything, y’know. I’ll try, though. Let
me
see. Cavendish and I played billiards after lunch; that would be from about two o’clock till a little after three.’

‘You two were in the billiard room the whole of that period, I take it?’

‘Rather. Had to keep an eye on each other to see there was no monkeying with the score,’ said Knott-Sloman facetiously.

‘Miss Thrale was mistaken, then, when she said you came into the lounge about ten to three?’

After the slightest hesitation Knott-Sloman replied, showing his teeth in an apologetic and dentifrice-advertisement smile. ‘Of course. Damned silly of me. Just shows how difficult it is to remember everything. I went into the lounge for a minute to compare my watch with the clock there. I had some letters to write and didn’t want to miss the afternoon post. Found it was later than I thought, so Cavendish and I just finished off that game, and then I came in here, wrote my letters and walked down to the village with them. Didn’t get back till after you’d discovered poor old Bellamy. How is he? Going to turn the comer, I hope.’

The superintendent said that there was some slight hope of Bellamy’s recovery. He asked next whether there had been anyone else in the study while Knott-Sloman was writing his letters.

‘Yes, Miss Cavendish was there. She was busy quill-driving too.’

Bleakley was about to dismiss this witness when Nigel, who had been sitting hunched-up in his chair, gazing noncommittally down his nose, roused himself and said:

‘You say you knew O’Brien in the war. Were you in the R.A.F.?’

Knott-Sloman gave him an insolent stare. ‘So Saul also is among the sleuths. Well, wonders never cease. If you want to know, I was a pilot till ‘sixteen: then I got a job on the staff. I came across O’Brien because I held a command in his sector from the summer of ‘seventeen. Quite satisfied now?’

‘Can you tell me the name and address of anyone living who was in O’Brien’s flight or squadron or whatever it is?’ Nigel answered imperturbably.

‘Let me see.’ Knott-Sloman appeared to be taken rather aback. ‘Anstruther, Greaves, Fear, McIlray—they all went west, though. Ah, I’ve got the man for you. Jimmy Hope. He was living somewhere down this way when I heard of him last: a chicken farm just outside Bridgewest—Staynton; that was the name of the place.’

‘Thanks. You interested in aeroplane engines?’

Knott-Sloman surveyed him insolently. ‘Not particularly. Are you?’ He turned to Bleakley. ‘Perhaps when your assistant has finished with the round games he will permit me to go.’

Bleakley looked inquiringly at Nigel, who said in his most infuriating manner, ‘O.K. We’ll get down to
a
bout of consequences tomorrow, if the gentleman cares to play.’

Knott-Sloman scowled at him and departed. Bleakley raised his eyebrows at Nigel and was about to say something, when a constable entered hurriedly. A poker had been found in the incinerator. It naturally enough bore no signs by now of having been used for the attack on Bellamy: but Mrs Grant swore that she had used it at lunchtime to poke the kitchen range, and she conceded grudgingly that even the slut Nellie would not be such a fool as to put it in the incinerator. Nellie was not on the spot to confirm this, as she always went home for a few hours after washing up the lunch things, but Bleakley arranged that she should be sent to him as soon as she returned.

‘That incinerator’s in the scullery,’ he said. ‘Whoever it was had to go into the kitchen for the poker, and go right through the kitchen again to hide it in the incinerator. Lucky for him Mrs Grant takes her nap upstairs in her bedroom. She must be a sound sleeper, and no error, to sleep through all that.’

‘If, indeed, she was asleep at all,’ said Nigel in tones of bloodcurdling suggestiveness.

The superintendent looked startled, then contemplative, then amused. ‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘you can’t pull my leg like that. Mrs Grant may be an old — but she don’t go about shooting people and battering them with pokers, I’ll lay my pension on it. Well, we’d better get on with it. Miss Cavendish next.’

Philip Starling’s description of Georgia had been very accurate, Nigel thought, watching her as Bleakley put his preliminary questions. Her eyes, that the night before had been so happy and vivacious, now were cups of sorrow—dazed, forlorn, hopeless as a ghost’s; she moved as though her whole body were bruised; yet in its steely control and the restraint of hand and feature there was something indomitable.

‘Yes,’ she was saying, ‘Fergus did say he was going to leave me his money, or some of it. I’ve got all I need, really; but we used to joke about how I would have enough to explore Atlantis when he was dead. He was very ill, you know, and didn’t expect—’

Her voice shook very slightly and she had to stop. There’s only one country you want to explore now, thought Nigel, and that’s the country O’Brien has gone to.

Georgia knew nothing more about the will. When told that O’Brien had been murdered she was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Yes,’ with a shuddering intensity, as though submitting to a blow she had for a long time seen coming. Then she beat her small brown hand on the table and exclaimed:

‘No! Who would ever kill him? He had no enemies. Only cowards and bullies get murdered. He was very ill. The doctors said he could not live for long. Why can’t you leave him in peace now?’

Bleakley tilted back his chair and looked at her intently. ‘I’m sorry, miss, but there doesn’t seem any chance of it being suicide. Why, you’re the only one of
his
friends who hasn’t said that he was the last person to kill himself.’

After this outburst, Georgia Cavendish withdrew into herself again, answering Bleakley’s questions in an absent-minded way. She corroborated Lucilla’s statement that she had been with her in the lounge from lunchtime till about two forty-five. She had then gone into the study to write a letter: Knott-Sloman had come in a little after three o’clock—she could not be sure of exact times. He was still there when she finished her letter and went up to her room. She had stayed in her room till she heard the commotion below. She had no witness to this. Lucilla had been just behind her as she ran downstairs. When Bleakley had finished, Nigel said:

‘I’m afraid this is a very impertinent question, Miss Cavendish; but will you tell us just how things stood between you and O’Brien?’

Georgia looked at him hard; then, as though he had passed some test, she gave him a friendly smile and said:

‘We loved each other. We really did ever since that first time we met in Africa—at least, I did. But we didn’t seem to realise it till just lately. As soon as I—I knew, I wanted us to get married: I like carrying things to extremes,’ she added with a ghost of her old impish smile. ‘But Fergus said the doctors had told him he was a dying man, and he didn’t want to saddle me with a corpse. I thought that was all rot, of course,
but
he stood firm. Said Nature had not intended me for a sick nurse. So we just—we were lovers.’