Thou Shell of Death (17 page)

Bleakley beamed proudly from Blount to Nigel, as though showing off an infant prodigy. ‘We never thought of that, Mr Strangeways,’ he said.

‘Then Sloman got Miss Thrale to write that note. They wanted O’Brien in the hut, where the murder and fake suicide could be done without interruptions,’ the inspector continued.

‘Why wasn’t the note destroyed, then?’

‘I suggest that either O’Brien folded it up and stuck it in the window absent-mindedly, or that Sloman found it on his body, kept it till the suicide fake was exposed, and then put it there to throw all the suspicion on Miss Thrale. From what I’ve heard about him he’s quite capable of double-crossing. I imagine he must have been talking with O’Brien for at least a quarter of an hour, possibly manoeuvring to get near the revolver. That would put the actual murder about twelve-thirty. Faking the suicide and generally tidying up might take him ten minutes longer. Then he looks out and finds himself trapped by the snow thickening on the ground. He daren’t walk out, in case the snow should stop before it had filled in his footprints. So he sits down and thinks it out, and finally lights on the idea of wearing O’Brien’s shoes and walking backwards.’

‘M’m,’ said Nigel. ‘He must have taken a long time to think it out. The snow was thinning at quarter to
two
, which suggests that the tracks must have been made somewhere about one-thirty; otherwise they would have been far more obliterated. It was nearly an hour before the bright idea struck him. Well, I always thought he was a bit of a numbskull, in spite of having been on the staff in the war. The wonder is that he could have thought up all the rest of the bag of tricks.’

‘He had to get the shoes back into the hut,’ the inspector went on. ‘No doubt that was done when Mr Strangeways was holding his reception there the next morning.’ Blount’s voice was at its driest, but the whimsical sideways glance he gave Nigel over his spectacles took the sting out of his words. ‘Did you happen to notice whether Knott-Sloman was carrying a spare pair of shoes?’

‘I can definitely state that he was not,’ Nigel replied with equal seriousness; ‘but he was wearing an overcoat and could easily have got them stowed away somewhere in it.’

‘Good. That brings us to the attack on the man Bellamy. I have been examining the place where it was made, and I think it would have been difficult for one person to synchronise it successfully. We shall have to make some experiments before we can be definite on the point. But the
easiest
method, if I may so put it, would have been for someone to have kept watch on the passage and the main staircase, after Bellamy had come out from the kitchen passage, while his accomplice hurried into the kitchen, took
the
poker and hid behind the swing-door. A good place to keep watch would be from the door of the lounge. Knott-Sloman and Miss Thrale were together for five minutes, Cavendish has deposed, in the middle of the game of billiards. That would have been ample time. I gather your chief objection to such a theory, Mr Strangeways, is the lack of motive for a
premeditated
murder by Knott-Sloman. Now you know what penalties are attached to blackmail. Supposing O’Brien had told Sloman that he intended to expose him as a blackmailer. Wouldn’t that have given Sloman a sufficient motive to do away with him? He might easily prefer the risk of hanging for a sheep to the certainty of going to prison for a lamb.’

‘Yes,’ said Nigel, ‘you make it all sound most convincing. What action are you going to take?’

‘The superintendent agrees that we should wait to see if we can’t get more evidence. In any case, the chief constable must be consulted first. But there can be no harm in asking Sloman to explain—er—some of the disputed points of evidence, don’t you think, sir.’

‘That’s right,’ said Bleakley. ‘I’ll fetch him in.’

Knott-Sloman entered, his hands in his pockets, a bold stare in his pale-blue eyes. The inspector introduced himself, then said:

‘There are certain points, sir, in which your evidence conflicts with—er—other evidence we have received. We shall be glad if you can assist us. At the same time, you are not compelled to answer our questions, and you may wish to consult a solicitor first.’

Knott-Sloman, who had been fidgeting about, suddenly sat stone-still. It was as though someone had begun sniping from a nearby roof. ‘Well, let’s hear your questions first,’ he said.

‘You gave evidence, I think, that shortly after midnight on the night of the crime, you stopped playing billiards and went straight up to bed?’ There was the slightest emphasis on the ‘straight’.

‘Yes, of course.’ Knott–Sloman eyed Blount warily. ‘No! Damned silly of me! Quite forgot. I went out first for a breath of air.’

‘In the snow, sir? I don’t expect you stayed out long.’

‘No, just looked out of the door and came in again.’

The inspector’s voice became smooth, paternal, but faintly censorious, like that of a bank manager speaking to a client about a not very serious overdraft.

‘I’m just asking, because we have evidence that you were in the hut about twelve-fifteen.’

Knott-Sloman bounced up from his chair and struck the table with his fist. ‘This is all a damned bluff!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll not stand for any more of this insinuation.’

‘That’s as you like, sir,’ said Blount smoothly. Then his voice turned hard as granite. ‘But it’s by no means insinuation. We have a reliable witness’—Nigel blinked at the word ‘reliable’—‘who testifies to having seen a man in the hut at that time, and has since identified the man as yourself.’

Knott-Sloman’s bold stare challenged the inspector for a few seconds. Then it crumpled. He made a rather ghastly attempt at a conciliatory laugh.

‘Oh, all right, then. You fellows seem to know everything. Yes, I did just look into the hut.’

‘For what purpose, may I ask, sir?’

‘No, you bloody well may not,’ exclaimed Knott-Sloman, with a brief return to aggressiveness. Blount unexpectedly and adroitly shifted his ground.

‘A package, addressed by you to yourself at the Fizz-and-Frolic Club, has come into our possession,’ he said conversationally. ‘It contained certain letters written to Miss Thrale by Edward Cavendish. In view of the charges of blackmail made by Cavendish against Miss Thrale and yourself, you may think it advisable to give some explanation of how these letters came into your hands.’

Knott-Sloman’s eyes flickered from Blount to the superintendent.

‘Well, that’s a bit of a facer,’ he said with an apologetic laugh. ‘I don’t like letting a woman down, but … It’s like this: Lucilla—Miss Thrale—gave me a package yesterday. She said she wanted me to put it in some safe place. Seemed to me rather curious then, but of course I didn’t know what was in it. I can see now she wouldn’t want letters like that about the place when there was likely to be a search. But it’s ridiculous to talk about blackmail. I’m afraid poor old Cavendish’s financial worries have made him a bit unbalanced. There’s nothing criminal in a woman
keeping
her old love-letters, is there? Or perhaps the police don’t allow us to do even that nowadays.’

‘I see,’ replied the inspector in tones of polite but devastating incredulity. ‘No doubt then you will be able to give us an equally—er—satisfactory explanation why in one of these letters there was also a note written by you to O’Brien suggesting that some pecuniary redress should be made to Miss Thrale.’

‘What the devil? But I couldn’t find it—’

‘So
that’s
what you were looking for in the hut.’

Knott-Sloman’s resistance crumbled like a collapsing house. His expression was a shameful mixture of panic and baffled rage.

‘So the little bitch double-crossed me! She must have had the note and put it amongst her letters. I suppose she told you to examine them, too. My God, and after I’d written it for her, too.’

‘You admit, then, that you wrote it?’

‘Yes, of course. And if I’d known Lucilla was going to do the dirty on me like this, I’d have cut off my right hand before I—I’d better explain. I was sorry for her. O’Brien had treated her badly, and frankly I thought he ought to pay for it. Perhaps the method was a bit unconventional, but I didn’t want him to be dragged into a breach-of-promise case.’

‘Your motive sounds most laudable, sir, but I think the law might use a harsher word than “unconventional” for your proceedings.’

‘Just a minute,’ Nigel broke in. ‘Did Miss Thrale actually suggest that you should approach O’Brien on these lines? And when did you give him the note?’

‘Yes, she did. I gave it to him after tea on Christmas Day,’ Knott-Sloman said sullenly.

‘Why do it in writing? Why not have talked to him about it?’

Knott-Sloman twisted in his chair. ‘Well, y’see, I was going to talk to him later, of course. But he was a bit hot-tempered, y’know, and I thought—well—the note would give him time to think things over and cool down.’

‘You were going to talk to him in the hut that night? Or was Miss Thrale going to? Is that why she wrote
her
note asking him to meet her there?’

‘No, damn you, I wasn’t!’ shouted Knott-Sloman, goaded beyond endurance. ‘And I neither know nor care what Lucilla was doing.’

‘If you weren’t going to the hut to talk to O’Brien, for what purpose did you go?’ Blount pursued.

‘Well, if you must know, I wanted to recover that note of mine, in case he hadn’t destroyed it. It occurred to me, thinking it over, that the note might be misconstrued if anyone else found it.’

‘Just so. I take it, then, that you went to the hut, but failed to find the note. How do you account for its being amongst the letters you sent off the next day?’

‘God knows. Presumably Lucilla got hold of it somehow.’

‘Which suggests that she also went to the hut, either
before
or after you did. Did you know that she had made a written assignation with O’Brien there?’

‘No,’

‘When you failed to find the note in the hut, you went straight back to the house? You did not wait till O’Brien came out?’

‘I did NOT! Are you trying to plant this murder on me?’ Knott-Sloman’s voice rose and cracked. He was almost blubbering. Then with a great effort he controlled himself and said, ‘When I was in the hut, I thought I heard a noise near the house. I went out quickly and hid amongst some bushes to the right of the hut. I saw O’Brien cross the lawn and enter the hut. That’s all I saw. I went straight back into the house after that and to bed. Take it or leave it. It’s the truth. You won’t get any more out of me.’

To everyone’s surprise Blount took him at his word and told him he could go. The object of this manoeuvre was at once apparent, for Blount asked the superintendent to fetch Lucilla Thrale in before she could have any conversation with the last witness.

‘Now, Miss Thrale,’ the inspector began without preamble, ‘you say you did not go out to the hut on the night of the murder?’

‘Of course I didn’t. I was in bed.’

‘In spite of having made an appointment there with O’Brien?’

‘How many more times do I have to repeat it? I didn’t go because Fergus had told me he didn’t want me to.’

‘Exactly. You gave a packet of letters yesterday to Mr Knott-Sloman, asking him to put them in a safe place for you. Was it your suggestion that he should address them to his club?’ Blount’s abrupt change of direction took Lucilla off her balance.

‘No. No, I … I didn’t know what he was going to do with them. Oh, God, you haven’t read them?’ she gasped, as realisation dawned on her. The rest was something like a rout. Lucilla strenuously but not very convincingly denied that the letters had been kept for the purposes of blackmail and had been disposed of because a general search was feared. She had handed them over to Knott-Sloman after lunch. Faced with the note that Knott-Sloman had written to O’Brien, she denied furiously that he had written it at her suggestion, called him no gentleman and a good deal worse for having said so, and refused to admit any knowledge of how it had come to be amongst the letters from Edward Cavendish. The inspector told her that she had been accused by Knott-Sloman of putting it there, and therefore presumably of having got it somehow from O’Brien. At this her indignation rose to fever pitch, and Blount thought it expedient to let her go.

‘She’ll only think up a lot of lies about Knott-Sloman in revenge; and we’ve got quite enough lies already in this case to drive us insane,’ Blount explained.

‘Well, you’ve certainly driven a good-sized wedge between the pair of them,’ said Nigel.

‘Yes. We’ll get something from them soon. They’re
both
thoroughly rattled; that’s when the criminal feels compelled to take some action. And
that’s
when he begins to make mistakes.’

Action indeed followed fast enough, though it was not quite what the inspector had bargained for. At about six-thirty the maid, Lily Watkins, whom Lady Marlinworth had sent to replace Bellamy, entered Knott-Sloman’s room with a can of hot water. She was thinking of her young man and humming to herself. But, when she saw what was lying on the floor beyond the bed, her humming abruptly ceased. She dropped the hot-water can, screamed, and rushed out of the door screaming.

X

TOLD IN A —

NIGEL AND INSPECTOR
Blount were sitting in the study. They had been going over some of the salient points of the case, but the conversation had somehow or other turned to cricket and they were now discussing the new lbw rule. Into this academic dispute the cries from overhead dropped like a bomb. They sprang to their feet and tore upstairs, Bolter, who had been on guard at the front door, hard on their heels. On the landing they met Lily Watkins. She was sobbing convulsively and could only point to the door of Knott-Sloman’s bedroom. Blount hurriedly ordered Bolter to keep everyone downstairs, and ran into the room. The first thing they noticed was a smell of bitter almonds on the air; the next was the disarray of the bed; the eiderdown and top blanket seemed to have been dragged right over to one side. Then they saw the body. It was lying on its back, one hand convulsively clutching the bedclothes. The jaws were set hard, and there was froth at the corners of the mouth. But it was chiefly the wide, unwinking, atrocious stare of those pale-blue eyes that had sent Lily Watkins screaming
from
the room. Cyril Knott-Sloman was dead, beyond question or remedy.