Thou Shell of Death (26 page)

‘Then comes the final provocation. The man who has taken Judith Fear away from him twenty years ago now robs him again. Lucilla Thrale, who is his mistress, leaves him for O’Brien. His mind is made up now, if it wasn’t before, that he will kill O’Brien. He writes the threatening letters. Very melodramatic, no doubt, but the whole case is melodramatic and the man is half mad with his hatred of O’Brien. He was a frequent visitor at Knott-Sloman’s roadhouse, and wrote the notes on the typewriter there so that there could be no possibility of their being traced back to
him
. His opportunity comes when he is invited to the Christmas party down here. He sends off the third note and makes his preparations. He knows that his sister has some poison, and prepares the nut as a second line of attack. His first line is to shoot O’Brien and stage it as a suicide: it is partly with that end in view that he wrote the threatening letters, to ensure that O’Brien should be armed.

‘When he arrives at Chatcombe he finds that the hut is the ideal place for a murder; away from the house, and soundproof. The next business is to get O’Brien there. No doubt he would have got him out into the hut on some other pretext, but it wasn’t necessary, O’Brien having planned to sleep there already. Perhaps Cavendish had guessed he would do so for safety. He dopes you and Bellamy to make sure there shall be no interference that night, should his opportunity arise. Then he watches.’

‘Where from?’ interrupted Nigel.

‘The veranda, most probably.’

‘Just on the off-chance that O’Brien would get out of bed and go for a stroll into the hut? Very sanguine of Cavendish.’

‘Well,’ said the inspector, rather nettled, ‘Cavendish may have made an appointment with O’Brien to meet him in the hut: or he may have discovered that Miss Thrale had asked O’Brien to meet her there. I can check up on that when we start asking Miss Thrale a few questions about one of the other developments of the case. The point is that O’Brien
did
go to the hut,
and
you’ve as good as proved that Cavendish did too. Surely you’re not going back on that, are you, Mr Strangeways?’

‘No, no. Certainly not. Pardon the interruption.’

‘Cavendish may have given O’Brien some very plausible reason for his coming to the hut, but I don’t think O’Brien would have been right off his guard at first. They talk for a bit, and then Cavendish pounces on him, and there’s a struggle in the course of which Cavendish turns the revolver against O’Brien and shoots him. The struggle was the first point at which his plans went wrong, because it left clues—the bruises on the wrist and the broken cufflink—which aroused your suspicions of the apparent suicide. Cavendish must have relied on lulling O’Brien’s watchfulness to the extent of being able to get at his gun without a struggle. He failed in that, but he had a bit of luck in finding in O’Brien’s pocket or on the table the note written by Miss Thra1e asking O’Brien to meet her in the hut. He keeps it for future use, to draw suspicion on to Miss Thrale should the suicide fake be exposed. He tidies up the mess, and prepares to leave. Then he discovers to his horror that the ground is thick with snow. He sits down to find a way out of the trap. Finally he puts on O’Brien’s shoes, walks backwards to the house, and everything is apparently OK.’

‘But Knott-Sloman has seen him enter the hut,’ put in the superintendent.

‘Uh-huh. And he may have seen a lot more. Anyway, the next morning Cavendish gets the shoes back into
the
hut and thinks he’s sitting pretty. He is soon disillusioned. The police suspect murder. He plants Lucilla Thrale’s note in O’Brien’s room for the police to find. But worse is to come. Knott-Sloman tells him he has seen him in the hut last night and demands a large sum for his silence. Cavendish is in desperation. His finances are in a precarious state and to buy off Knott-Sloman would ruin him. He temporises, but is determined that Knott-Sloman will have to go. So he puts the poisoned nut among the plateful by Sloman’s bedside. His anxiety and distraction of manner were due to the uncertainty whether Knott-Sloman might not go to the police with his story before he came to the fatal nut. On top of all this Lucilla has weighed in with another piece of blackmail. She will tell the police what motives Cavendish had for murdering O’Brien, unless he buys her silence. It may have been after this that Cavendish planted her note in O’Brien’s room. At any rate, he is in a fearful predicament, and he very cleverly takes the first opportunity of spiking Lucilla’s guns by admitting to the police the motives he had for killing O’Brien.’

‘What about the other note?’ asked Nigel. ‘The one written by Knott-Sloman threatening action if O’Brien did not recompense Lucilla for deserting her?’

‘I should say Sloman
did
find it in the hut, in spite of his denial, and sent it off in the package of letters to be rid of it.’

‘But why on earth not burn it at once? It wasn’t of potential value, like Cavendish’s letters. Now suppose Arthur Bellamy had found it.’

Nigel’s supposition made both police officers lift up their heads in surprise. He continued:

‘Soon after I’d discovered O’Brien’s body I asked Arthur to look round the hut to see if anything was missing. He might easily have found that note. Now he was absolutely devoted to his master and was quite capable of taking justice into his own hands. He finds the note and it arouses vague suspicions in his mind. Later in the morning he confronts Knott-Sloman with it. Sloman sees the danger of this note getting into the hands of the police, and plays for time. He plans with Lucilla to lay out Bellamy and take the note from him. After lunch Lucilla, sitting in the lounge, rings the bell. Bellamy comes. Meanwhile Sloman gets the poker, hides behind the swing door. He cracks Bellamy on his way back to the kitchen, takes the note and hides the body and the poker.’

‘But your own argument still holds. Why didn’t he burn the note?’

‘Everything had to be done very quickly. He was supposed to have gone out of the billiard room to get the right time. He slipped the note back into his pocket. Now Lucilla told us that she handed over Cavendish’s letters to Sloman after lunch on that day. He very likely had them in his pocket. It’s surely not too imaginative to suppose that the note he had taken from Bellamy got slipped into one of the envelopes as
he
put it in his pocket. As soon as the game of billiards with Cavendish is over, he goes into the morning room and packs up these letters into a parcel and buzzes off to the village to post them. After that he finds that he’s lost the note. Hard cheese on old Sloman.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the inspector meditatively, ‘that might well have been it. But it’s going to be the devil to prove.’

‘Don’t you worry.’ Nigel was looking very grim. ‘Bleakley, will you ask Miss Thrale to step this way. The one advantage we amateurs have over you chaps is that there are no rules to stop us hitting below the belt.’ He added to Blount, ‘You’d better pretend afterwards that you didn’t hear what is about to transpire.’

Lucilla Thrale swayed in, beautiful and wary and sleek as a panther. Nigel took up a sheet of paper that lay in front of him.

‘Before Knott-Sloman was so unfortunately taken from our midst,’ he said, ‘he left a confession. He says, amongst other things, that it was
you
who originated the plan for the attack on Arthur Bellamy. Is this—?’

He had no need to continue. Lucilla’s lovely face flushed darkly. Her upper lip rose in a snarl.

‘The swine!’ she exclaimed shrilly. ‘It was his idea from beginning to—’ She stopped suddenly and clapped her hand to her mouth. But it was too late by then. Blount rushed into the breach that Nigel had made, and Lucilla had to capitulate altogether. Before long they had a signed statement from her. Her part in
the
assault on Bellamy had been very much as Nigel had conjectured. Knott-Sloman had assured her, so she said, that they were both in danger as long as Bellamy had possession of the note: because the police would say, what Bellamy had already hinted to him earlier in the day, that they had conspired to kill O’Brien through fear of their blackmailing attempts being exposed by him. Bellamy, Knott-Sloman told her, had threatened in a very ugly way what he would do to him if he obtained further proof of his suspicions. But Knott-Sloman had assured her that he was only going to knock Bellamy out and get the note from him. After that it would be their word against his. She had been horrified to hear that the man had been nearly killed. Nigel and the inspector, however, came independently to the conclusion that Knott-Sloman had been so alarmed by Bellamy’s threats of violence that he had determined to get in his blow first—and a decisive one. The one point over which Lucilla stood firm was that she had no notion the murderer of O’Brien was being blackmailed by Knott-Sloman.

After this Lucilla was dismissed. Blount wagged his head solemnly at Nigel and his left eyelid dropped the fraction of an inch. ‘Your methods are awful unconventional, Mr Strangeways,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s a good thing we’ve got that Bellamy business cleared up. It was clever of Knott-Sloman to admit, when we confronted him with his note, that he had been looking for it in the hut and failed to find it. It took our attention away from the connection there might
be
between it and the attack on Bellamy. There can’t be much question that Cavendish killed Knott-Sloman because he was threatening to tell us he’d seen him in the hut. I doubt Sloman wouldn’t let Lucilla in on that; he wouldn’t want to share the hush money with anyone else. Well now. Yes. We have motive and opportunity against Cavendish for both the crimes, though, of course, the motive for the second depends on his having committed the first. We shall have to do a good deal more inquiry and investigation, particularly at the Cavendishes’ house in London. But we’ve got enough against him, I doubt, to ask for a warrant. What do you think, Mr Strangeways?’

Nigel started a little, and said dreamily, ‘Sorry; I’ve been lost in admiration of your narrative powers.’

‘Come now, Mr Strangeways. Are you trying to pull my leg?’

‘Heaven forbid! No. I think you’ve made out your case admirably. But I believe I can get you certain evidence at once that will make any further investigation unnecessary. It’s in a book, by the way. I expect O’Brien had a copy in the hut; if you’ll just lend me the key I’ll go and fetch it. The name of the book, you’ll not be surprised to hear, is
The Revenger’s Tragedy.’

Nigel levered himself to his feet. He was just taking the key from the inspector when a scream rang out, another scream, and then they heard something bumping down the staircase. Nigel was out of the door first. It was Georgia’s voice they had heard. A
pang
of utter despair wrenched his heart. The three arrived at the foot of the staircase in a bunch. The constable who had been on guard at the front door was already there, bending over Georgia’s body. Nigel thrust him away and knelt down beside her.

‘Georgia! Darling! For God’s sake! Are you all right? What’s happened?’

The eyelid he could see fluttered in a movement absurdly like a wink. Then closed. Then her head turned and both eyes fluttered open.

‘Oh dear,’ Georgia said dazedly, ‘I didn’t half come down the hell of a crack.’

It was at this moment that they heard through the open hall door the roar of a powerful engine accelerating away. Blount and Bleakley rushed out. They saw the back of O’Brien’s Lagonda swaying down the curving drive. At the wheel was Edward Cavendish. Bleakley was blowing his whistle like mad. A police car swerved round out of the back yard. ‘Telephone!’ Blount snapped to the superintendent. ‘Get the net out. You know the car’s number.’

Georgia gave Nigel’s hand a squeeze. ‘Go along,’ she said. ‘Do what you can. I’m all right. I had to give him a chance.’

Nigel bent down swiftly, kissed her, tweaked her smooth brown cheek, and ran out of the house, leaving Georgia sitting against the stair-foot, her legs spread out in an unladylike fashion, but smiling with peculiar contentment. Nigel just had time to swing himself into
the
back of the police car as it leapt forward. Blount leaned over from the front seat.

‘Damned convenient for him his sister fell down the stairs just at that moment, blast her!’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Nigel, looking down his nose. ‘I suppose he happened to be in the lavatory by the front door, and took the opportunity of the policeman leaving his post to slip out and do a bunk. A brilliant piece of opportunism by old Edward.’

Blount looked at him irritably. ‘Well, he hasn’t an earthly chance of getting away. A confession of guilt, that’s all it is.’

The tyres screamed. They were at the end of the drive and the gates were shut. Blount leapt out and shook them. They were locked too. The chauffeur blew Wagnerian blasts on his horn. The lodgekeeper emerged, in very slow motion.

‘Unlock the gates! Get a move on! Police.’

‘Gennulman told me his lordship had given orders for the gates to be locked,’ mumbled the man uncertainly.

‘If you don’t open those — gates this instant I’ll have you gaoled for obstruction. That’s better. Which way did he go?’

The lodgekeeper pointed. They flung into motion again. A minute had been lost. That meant a mile, when one was chasing a Lagonda. The high, narrow hedges tearing past made Nigel feel as if he was being shot out of the mouth of a cannon. No, not a cannon, he thought as a sudden bend sent him sprawling
into
the other corner of the back seat, emphatically not a cannon; something more tortuous. One of those involved brass instruments that Thomas Hardy delighted in: a serpent!

‘“There is a place provided in hell

To sit upon a serpent’s knee,” ’

he sang dolefully. But was silenced by a branch that flicked out at him like a wet towel. Everything was blurred and rackety and disintegrating: it might have been a dream out of which he had just awoken. Only he was still in it. What were they doing, chasing a respectable financier down a Somerset lane? Wild West stuff! What’s the hurry? He can’t get away. We may only drive him into doing something desperate, and that would be a fatal error. Nigel became aware that his teeth were gritted together and his knees trembling. He was excited, enjoying the hunt. Blood sports in Somerset. Faugh!