Thou Shell of Death (20 page)

‘Dinner,’ said Nigel ruminatively: ‘dinner. It strikes a chord. There was something I meant to ask you. Now what the devil was it? Yes, I remember. You were going to tell me something O’Brien had done or said at dinner on Christmas night. You were saying, “I suppose you noticed how O’Brien—” and then we were interrupted by that shindy over Arthur Bellamy.’

Philip Starling looked puzzled. Then his brow cleared. ‘It was that passage he recited: “Doth the silkworm expend her yellow labours.” He gave us to understand that it was Webster. Actually, it comes in one of Tourneur’s plays. I didn’t notice it at the time. It struck me later. Odd, because he seemed a well-read fellow.’

Nigel was disappointed. He had expected some more valuable revelation. An hour later he went into the morning room and found Georgia Cavendish writing letters. She had on a suede leather coat and
a
bright red skirt, and her parrot was sitting on her shoulder.

‘Will you come out for a walk?’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

The parrot cocked an obscene eye at him, and enunciated brightly, ‘You naughty old b—!’

Georgia laughed. ‘I must apologise for Nestor. He had a nautical education. Yes, of course I will. Just wait till I’ve finished this and put Nestor in his cage: he doesn’t like rain.’

A few minutes later Georgia came downstairs, enveloped in a huge cavalry sort of mackintosh, but with no hat. ‘Won’t you get your hair very wet?’ said Nigel, cramming on his own shapeless felt—an object so ancient that even the most uncritical bird would have thought twice before nesting in it.

‘I like rain on my head, if you don’t mind my looking like Medusa. How convenient it would be for a detective to wear a cap of darkness.’

‘I do. My hat is the sort of darkness that can be felt.’

Georgia laughed delightedly. ‘I’m so glad to find somebody who still makes puns. It’s the sign of a simple, childlike character—see Charles Lamb and savages passim.’

‘I’m afraid your belief in my simple, childlike nature will soon be shattered. My mind is really a tortuous sink of base suspicions.’

‘Well, it would be worth being disillusioned, if only to see what a tortuous sink looks like.’

‘It’s what the pedagogues call a transferred epithet. But seriously, I’ve dragged you out of the house to extract information from you.’

Georgia Cavendish made no comment. Nigel could not see the small fists in her big mackintosh pockets clench themselves. He was, as a matter of fact, giving Georgia full marks for having refrained from saying, ‘I thought you did not want me for my
beaux yeux
alone’—a temptation few women could have resisted. There was something a little intimidating about her uncompromising silence, now that their preliminary verbal sparring was over. He took a deep breath, and said:

‘I want you to tell me everything you can about O’Brien.’

Georgia was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘Are you asking me in your official capacity?’

‘I have no official position here. On the other hand, I am bound to give the police any information that seems to me to have a bearing on the crimes.’

‘Well, that’s honest at any rate,’ she said, looking down at the ground, her face puckered with indecision.

Nigel went on impulsively. ‘On paper I have worked it out that you are the person most likely to have committed both murders. In fact, I am quite convinced that you didn’t.’ He broke off, wondering why he should be so breathless. It was an extraordinary beginning to a relationship which neither of them could possibly have foreseen—this academic accusation
under
the sombre and dripping oak trees. Georgia had halted, and was digging her foot into a wet mass of leaves. At last she looked up at Nigel with a small swift smile and said:

‘Very well. I’ll tell you. What do you want to know?’

Nigel was never to forget that walk through the melancholy park and the tale that it unfolded to him. It was not so much the contrast between the rainy downcast skies under which they walked and the blazing African vistas that her tale opened up to him. What he remembered most vividly was Georgia herself—the small, compact figure in the huge mackintosh; her slouching yet somehow vital and characteristic gait; the rain streaming down her thin brown face, with its features resolute as a ship’s figurehead and vivacious as the sea in a summer gale.

‘I want you to tell me how you first met O’Brien, and everything that happened after it. Anything he said to you at any time about the people here. It’s really important, or I wouldn’t ask you. Perhaps it will be a good thing for you not to keep it bottled up any longer,’ he added with a flash of intuitive sympathy.

‘It was last year. I was on an expedition into the Libyan Desert. Lieutenant Galton, a young cousin of mine—Henry Lewis—and myself. It was Henry’s first expedition: he was highly strung, but a good youngster and dead keen. We were going to try to find the site of Zerzura, the lost oasis. People have tried
before
, and will go on trying. Nobody has found it yet. It’s one of those alluring legends, like Atlantis. We took two Ford four-cylinders, rigged up for desert work. We had food for two months, and enough petrol and water to make the thing a joyride—or so we thought. Well, I won’t bore you with a geography lesson: anyway, all that part of the desert looks alike: good hard sand as far as you can see, and nothing much else to look at except the sun and an occasional oasis till you get down to the Wadi Hawa in the south. A damn’ fool sort of place to go motoring in, most people would think. I thought so too, before very long. On the twelfth day, I think it was, we had a hell of a sandstorm. They’re quite harmless, you know, but apt to get on your nerves if you’re not used to them. Henry wasn’t. It left him pretty shaken, and after that he got a touch of the sun and began talking wildly about getting out of this infernal cauldron. It
is
a bit trying, if you’re not used to it. It was my fault for bringing him. Anyway, one morning Galton and I were about twenty yards away from the cars taking observations—their magnetism affects compasses, you know, at close quarters—when we heard one of the cars starting up. Henry had cracked: he was going to drive straight home. Galton ran forward and got on to the car and stopped the engine. Then Henry shot him in the belly. After that Henry began to yell with laughter and take potshots with his revolver at the petrol and water tins on the other car. He holed five of them. There was nothing else for me to do. I
had
to shoot him. I shot him through the heart. He was lucky.’ Georgia added tonelessly, ‘Galton lived for three days more.’

Nigel had that helpless, sickish feeling in the stomach that comes to the sedentary city-dweller when he hears at first hand of desperate actions such as these. He opened his mouth, but there seemed no comment on heaven or earth adequate to the situation, so he lit a cigarette, which was extinguished almost at once by the rain and disintegrated slowly in his mouth. Georgia went on:

‘When it happened, we were between Uweinat and the Wadi Hawa, about a hundred and fifty miles away from the latter. I had the choice of going back to the rendezvous where we were expecting fresh supplies of water and petrol by camel transport from Selima, or pressing on across the Wadi Hawa to Kutum and Fasher. We did not expect the camels for several days, and in any case the only hope for Galton seemed to be to get him to Kutum, whence he could be flown to Khartoum. So I made him as comfortable as I could in the body of one of the cars, and piled on it the few tins Henry had left us and set off. There wasn’t much water left, anyway, and Galton needed a great deal, and we couldn’t travel very fast, because it made his pain intolerable. Still, we got across the Wadi Hawa by nightfall, and I thought perhaps my luck might have turned. It hadn’t. The next day we got into the subdesert, about the most hellish going for cars in the world—hard mounds of earth, tussocks of grass and
innumerable
dry rain channels. I reduced speed to seven miles an hour, but even that was too much for Galton, and I don’t blame him. So I stopped. Galton wanted me to leave him and go on, but I felt it was my own fault it had all happened, and he was too weak to make much of a protest. The next day he died. I managed to bury him. It seemed the least I could do, though I didn’t fancy it would be much use: the ground was too hard for me to get him in deep, and there are packs of wild dogs thereabouts—I had seen them in Wadi Hawa—also lions of a sort.

‘Well, after that I went on for a bit. What with one thing and another, there was only half a tin of water and a tin of petrol left. Also the springs kept breaking. I say, I hope I’m not boring you. I’m afraid all this is rather off the point for your purpose.’

Nigel cleared his dry throat and assured her that he was not finding the story tedious.

‘I suppose I was getting a little anxious, with the water so low; anyway, I must have been driving too fast, because the back axle broke—and, say what you like about Fords, their axles don’t break unless you maltreat them pretty outrageously. I was about a hundred miles from Kutum, but there are intervillage tracks nearer than that, so I swigged the rest of the water and began walking. You wouldn’t believe that anyone could be accused of jaywalking in the desert. I must be the king of jaywalkers, because I hadn’t gone more than half a mile when I trod on one of those blasted tussocks and sprained my ankle. I managed to
crawl
back to the car. If anyone
was
about the place, they’d be more likely to spot a car than a pedestrian. You can go a long time on one good bellyful of water, if you’ve trained yourself to it; but after three and a half days I was beginning to feel I’d gone long enough. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anyone who has died of thirst. It’s an uncongenial spectacle, and I had no intention of letting it get as far as that. I always carry a dose of poison about with me when I’m travelling. Prussic acid. Nice quick stuff. I was toying with this when I heard an aeroplane engine. Of course, I didn’t believe it at first. That sort of thing is generally one of the little sideshows that Providence puts up to amuse people in their last hours. But after a bit I managed to look up—and, sure enough, it
was
a real live aeroplane.

‘I waved, rather feebly, I suppose, and the bloke in the aeroplane waved back. I calculated that it would take about ten hours for him to fly back and for a car to get across to me, and I thought I might just manage to hold out ten hours. But the bloke didn’t go back. He circled about, only a hundred feet up, as though he was looking for a landing place. Damned silly waste of time, I called it. An archangel couldn’t land in country like that. I flapped my hands at him, trying to make him go away, but I was too far gone to make a very forceful protest. And then the bloke did land. It was just the sort of bloody grand lunatic thing Fergus would do. When I saw he really meant to come down, I propped myself up and watched with
my
eyes popping out. One couldn’t ask for a better entertainment in one’s last hours, and if the fool was determined to break his neck and lose me my last chance, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t watch the sport. He put up his tail and started to float down. I shall never see anything like it if I live to be ninety. He handled that plane as if it was a piece of thistledown. He pancaked at the very last moment, but he must still have been going about fifty when he touched. The plane bounced along over the tussocks like a kangaroo, and stopped about twenty yards short of my radiator, with the undercarriage looking like a theater after Boat Race night. Then the bloke jumped out and came up to me with a hell of a grin on his face and said: “Miss Cavendish, I presume.”’

‘Believe me, I was a good deal more shaken up than he was, and that’s saying a lot. In fact, as far as I remember, I burst out crying and was rather astonished to find I couldn’t stop. Fergus was sweet. He fetched me water out of the aeroplane and made me drink it in teaspoonfuls with a dash of brandy, while he told me an interminable and most improper story about a dowager on a picnic. After that I went to sleep, and when I woke up it was morning and Fergus was tinkering about with his plane. He made breakfast and told me who he was and how he had found me. The camel transport had gone to the rendezvous and waited about for us a bit. Then they had returned to Selima and given the alarm. Aeroplanes had been sent out, but they were searching too far north, of course.
After
a bit they found the other car and the remains of Henry Lewis. They could see the tracks of our car here and there going south, so they called it off, imagining that we were all right for the present. Fergus was at Khartoum when they returned, and suggested that he should go off in search for us round about the Wadi Hawa, to make sure that we were not in difficulties. That was how he had found me.

‘Well, I was still pretty weak that day, so I lay about watching Fergus trying to mend the undercarriage. I had asked him, by the way, why he was such a blithering ass as to attempt a landing on such a surface. He answered, characteristically, that—except for a bishop’s mitre—it was the only kind of thing he had not landed on so far and he wanted to see if it was possible. He said that now he would leave the bishop’s mitre until he was tired of life and try it then, as it would ensure his dying in the odour of sanctity. I told him he surely needn’t bother about repairing his plane, because they’d soon send out a search after him, and I was perfectly all right now, and anyway he’d never get the bus up into the air out of this. He said that (
a
) he liked repairing planes, (
b
) he had never been rescued before and he was not going to start now, (
c
) I was not perfectly all right, and the sooner I got back into a nursing home and began a rest cure the better, (
d
) that he hadn’t enough water with him to last till some officious jack-in-office at Khartoum had recovered from the effects of his last official dinner and condescended to send out a search party, and
(
e
)
that if a crate could come down in this country it could get up off it again. So that was that.