Scales of Justice

CHAPTER X Return to Swevenings

Lady Lacklander advanced slowly towards them.

“If that contraption of yours will support my weight, Octavius,” she said, “I’ll take it.”

They stood aside for her. Mr. Phinn suddenly began to gabble. “No, no, no! Not another word! I forbid it.”

She let herself down on a rustic seat.

“For God’s sake,” Mr. Phinn implored her frantically, “hold your tongue, Lady L.”

“Nonsense, Occy,” she rejoined, panting slightly. “Hold yours, my good fool.” She stared at him for a moment and then gave a sort of laugh.

“Good Lord, you think I did it myself, do you?”

“No, no, no. What a thing to say!”

She shifted her great torso and addressed herself to Alleyn. “I’m here, Roderick, virtually on behalf of my husband. The confession I have to offer is his.”

“At last,” Alleyn said. “Chapter 7.”

“Precisely. I’ve no idea how much you think you already know or how much you may have been told.”

“By me,” Mr. Phinn cried out, “nothing!”

“Humph!” she said. “Uncommon generous of you, Octavius.”

Mr. Phinn began to protest, threw up his hands and was silent.

“There are, however, other sources,” she went on. “I understand his wife has been kept posted.” She stared at Alleyn, who thought, “George has told Kitty Cartarette about Chapter 7 and Lady Lacklander has found out. She thinks Kitty has told me.” He said nothing.

“You may suppose, therefore,” Lady Lacklander continued, “that I am merely making a virtue of necessity.”

Alleyn bowed.

“It is not altogether that. To begin with, we are, as a family, under a certain obligation to you, Octavius.”

“Stop!” Mr. Phinn shouted. “Before you go on much further, before you utter—”

“Mr. Phinn,” Alleyn cut in, breaking about three vital items of the police code in one sentence, “if you don’t stop chattering, I shall take drastic steps to make you. Shut up, Mr. Phinn.”

“Yes, Occy,” Lady Lacklander said, “I couldn’t agree more. Either shut up or take yourself off, my dear fellow.” She lifted a tiny, fat hand, holding it aloft as if it was one of Mr. Phinn’s kittens. “Do me the favour,” she said, “of believing I have thought things over very carefully, and be quiet.”

While Mr. Phinn still hesitated, eyeing Alleyn and fingering his lips, Lady Lacklander made a brief comprehensive gesture with her short arms and said, “Roderick, my husband was a traitor.”

They made a strange group, sitting there on uncomfortable rustic benches. Fox took unobtrusive notes, Mr. Phinn held his head in his hands, Lady Lacklander, immobile behind the great façade of her fat, talked and talked. Cats came and went, gracefully indifferent to the human situation.

“That,” Lady Lacklander said, “is what you will find in Chapter 7.” She broke off and, after a moment, said, “This is not going to be easy and I’ve no wish to make a fool of myself. Will you forgive me for a moment?”

“Of course,” Alleyn said, and they waited while Lady Lacklander, staring before her, beat her puff-ball palms on her knees and got her mouth under control. “That’s better,” she said at last. “I can manage now.” And she went on steadily. “At the time of the Zlomce incident my husband was in secret negotiation with a group of Prussian fascists. The top group: the men about Hitler. They looked upon him, it appears, as their trump card: a British diplomat whose name—” her voice creaked and steadied—“was above reproach in his own country. He was absolutely and traitorously committed to the Nazi programme.” Alleyn saw that her eyes were bitter with tears. “They never found that out at your M.I.5., Roderick, did they?”

“No.”

“And yet this morning I thought that perhaps you knew.”

“I wondered. That was all.”

“So she didn’t say anything.”

“She?”

“Maurice’s wife. Kitty.”

“No.”

“You never know,” she muttered, “with that sort of people what they may do.”

“Nor,” he said, “with other sorts either, it seems.”

A dark unlovely flush flooded her face.

“The extraordinary thing,” Mr. Phinn said suddenly, “is why. Why did Lacklander do it?”

“The Herrenvolk heresy?” Alleyn suggested. “An aristocratic Anglo-German alliance as the only alternative to war and communism and the only hope for the survival of his own class? It was a popular heresy at that time. He wasn’t alone. No doubt he was promised great things.”

“You don’t spare him,” Lady Lacklander said under her breath.

“How can I? In the new Chapter 7, I imagine, he doesn’t spare himself.”

“He repented bitterly. His remorse was frightful.”

“Yes,” Mr. Phinn said. “That is clear enough.”

“Ah, yes!” she cried out. “Ah, yes, Occy, yes. And most of all for the terrible injury he did your boy — most of all for that.”

“The injury?” Alleyn repeated, cutting short an attempt on Mr. Phinn’s part to intervene. “I’m sorry, Mr. Phinn. We must have it.”

Lady Lacklander said, “Why do you try to stop me, Occy? You’ve read it. You must want to shout it from the roof-tops.”

Alleyn said, “Does Sir Harold exonerate Ludovic Phinn?”

“Of everything but carelessness.”

“I see.”

Lady Lacklander put her little fat hands over her face. It was a gesture so out of key with the general tenor of her behaviour that it was as shocking in its way as a bout of hysteria.

Alleyn said, “I think I understand. In the business of the railway concessions in Zlomce, was Sir Harold, while apparently acting in accordance with his instructions from the British Government, about to allow the German interest to get control?”

He saw that he was right and went on, “And at the most delicate stage of these negotiations, at the very moment where he desired above all things that no breath of suspicion should be aroused, his private secretary goes out on a Central European bender and lets a German agent get hold of the contents of the vital cable which Sir Harold had left him to decode. Sir Harold is informed by his own government of the leakage. He is obliged to put up a terrific show of ambassadorial rage. He has no alternative but to send for young Phinn. He accuses him of such things and threatens him with such disastrous exposures, such disgrace and ruin, that the boy goes out and puts an end to it all. Was it like that?”

He looked from one to the other.

“It was like that,” Lady Lacklander said. She raised her voice as if she repeated some intolerable lesson. “My husband writes that he drove Viccy Phinn to his death as surely as if he had killed him with his own hands. He was instructed to do so by his Nazi masters. It was then that he began to understand what he had done and to what frightful lengths his German associates could drive him. I knew, at that time, he was wretchedly unhappy, but put it down to the shock of Viccy’s death and — as I, of course, thought — treachery. But the treachery, Occy, was ours, and your Viccy was only a foolish and tragically careless boy.” She looked at Mr. Phinn and frowned. “Yesterday,” she said, “after your row with Maurice over the trout, he came to me and told me he’d left a copy of the amended Chapter 7 at your house. Why haven’t you produced it, Occy? Why just now did you try to stop me? Was it because—”

“Dear me, no,” Mr. Phinn said very quietly, “not from any high-flown scruples, I assure you. It was, if you will believe me, in deference to my boy’s wishes. Before he killed himself, Viccy wrote to his mother and to me. He begged us to believe him innocent. He also begged us most solemnly, whatever the future might hold, never to take any action that might injure Sir Harold Lacklander. You may not have noticed, my dear Lady L., that my foolish boy hero-worshipped your husband. We decided to respect his wishes.”

Mr. Phinn stood up. He looked both old and shabby. “I am not concerned,” he said, “with the Lacklander conscience, the Lacklander motive, or the Lacklander remorse. I no longer desire the Lacklanders to suffer for my dear boy’s death. I do not, I think, believe any more in human expiation. Now if I may, I shall ask you to excuse me. And if you want to know what I did with Chapter 7, I burnt it to ashes, my dear Chief Inspector, half an hour ago.”

He raised his dreadful smoking cap, bowed to Lady Lacklander and walked into his house, followed by his cats.

Lady Lacklander stood up. She began to move towards the gate, seemed to recollect herself and paused. “I am going to Nunspardon,” she said. Alleyn opened the gate. She went out without looking at him, got into her great car and was driven away.

Fox said, “Painful business. I suppose the young fellow suspected what was up at the last interview. Unpleasant.”

“Very.”

“Still, as Mr. Phinn says, this Chapter 7 really puts him in the clear as far as killing Colonel Cartarette is concerned.”

“Well, no,” Alleyn said.

“No?”

“Not exactly. The Colonel left Chapter 7 at Jacob’s Cottage. Phinn, on his own statement, didn’t re-enter the house after his row with the Colonel. He returned to the willow grove, found the body and lost his spectacles. He read Chapter 7 for the first time this morning, I fancy, by the aid of a magnifying glass.”

“Of course,” Fox said, as they turned into Commander Syce’s drive, “it will have been a copy. The Colonel’d never hand over the original.”

“No. My guess is he locked the original in the bottom drawer of the left-hand side of his desk.”

“Ah! Now!” Fox said with relish. “That might well be.”

“In which case one of his own family or one of the Lacklanders or any other interested person has pinched it, and it’s probably gone up in smoke like its sister-ship. On the other hand, the bottom drawer may have been empty and the original typescript in Cartarette’s bank. It doesn’t very much matter, Fox. The publisher was evidently given a pretty sound idea of the alternative version by its author. He could always be called. We may not have to bring the actual text in evidence. I hope we won’t.”

“What d’you reckon is the dowager’s real motive in coming so remarkably clean all of a sudden?”

Alleyn said crossly, “I’ve had my bellyful of motives. Take your choice, Br’er Fox.”

“Of course,” Fox said, “she’s a very sharp old lady. She must have guessed we’d find out anyway.”

Alleyn muttered obscurely, “The mixture as before. And here we go with a particularly odious little interview. Look out for squalls, Br’er Fox. Gosh! See who’s here!”

It was Nurse Kettle. She had emerged from the front door, escorted by Commander Syce, who carried a napkin in his hand. She was about to enter her car, and this process was accelerated by Commander Syce, who quite obviously drew her attention to the approaching police car and then, limping to her own, opened the door and waited with some evidence of trepidation for her to get in. She did so without glancing at him and started her engine.

“She’s told him,” Alleyn said crossly, “that we’ve rumbled the ’bago.”

“Acting, no doubt,” Fox rejoined stiffly, “from the kindest of motives.”

“No doubt.” Alleyn lifted his hat as Nurse Kettle, having engaged her bottom gear with some precipitance, shot past them like a leaping eland. She was extremely red in the face.

Syce waited for them.

Fox pulled up and they both got out. Alleyn slung the golf bag over his shoulder as he addressed himself to Syce.

“May we speak to you indoors somewhere?” Alleyn asked.

Without a word Syce led the way into his living-room, where a grim little meal, half consumed, was laid out on a small table in close proximity to a very dark whisky-and-water.

The improvised bed was still in commission. A dressing-gown was folded neatly across the foot.

“Sit down?” Syce jerked out, but, as he evidently was not going to do so himself, neither Alleyn nor Fox followed his suggestion.

“What’s up now?” he demanded.

Alleyn said, “I’ve come to ask you a number of questions, all of which you will find grossly impertinent. They concern the last occasion when you were in Singapore. The time we discussed this morning, you remember, when you told us you introduced the present Mrs. Cartarette to her husband?”

Syce didn’t answer. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat and stared out of the window.

“I’m afraid,” Alleyn said, “I shall have to press this a little further. In a word, I must ask you if you were not, in fact, on terms of the greatest intimacy with Miss de Vere, as she was then.”

“Bloody impertinence.”

“Well, yes. But so, when one comes to think of it, is murder.”

“What the hell are you driving at?”

“Ah!” Alleyn exclaimed with one of his very rare gestures. “How footling all this is! You know damn’ well what I’m driving at. Why should we stumble about like a couple of maladroit fencers? See here. I’ve information from the best possible sources that before she was married, you were living with Mrs. Cartarette in Singapore. You yourself have told me you introduced her to Cartarette. You came back here and found them man and wife: the last thing, so you told me, that you had intended. All right. Cartarette was murdered last night in the bottom meadow, and there’s a hole in his head that might have been made by an arrow. You gave out that you were laid by with lumbago, but you were heard twanging away at your sixty-pound bow when you were supposed to be incapacitated on your bed. Now, send for your solicitor if you like and refuse to talk till he comes, but for the love of Mike don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m driving at.”

“Great grief!” Syce exclaimed with exactly the same inflection he had used of cats. “I liked Cartarette.”

“You may have liked Cartarette, but did you love his wife?”

“ ‘Love,’ ” Syce repeated turning purple. “What a word!”

“Well, my dear man — put it this way. Did she love you?”

“Look here, are you trying to make out that she egged me on or — or — I egged her on or any perishing rot of that sort! Thompson,” Commander Syce shouted angrily, “and Bywaters, by God!”

“What put them into your head, I wonder? The coincidence that he was a seafaring man and she, poor woman, an unfaithful wife?”

“A few more cracks like that and I bloody well will send for a solicitor.”

“You are being difficult,” Alleyn said without rancour. “Will you let me have the clothes you were wearing last evening?”

“What the hell for?”

“For one thing, to see if Cartarette’s blood is on them.”

“How absolutely piffling.”

“Well, may I have them?”

“I’m wearing them, blast it.”

“Would you mind wearing something else?”

Commander Syce fixed his intensely blue and slightly bloodshot eyes on a distant point in the landscape and said, “I’ll shift.”

“Thank you. I see you’ve been using this as a bed-sitting-room during, no doubt, your attack of lumbago. Perhaps for the time being you could shift into your dressing-gown and slippers.”

Syce followed this suggestion. Little gales of whisky were wafted from him, and his hands were unsteady, but he achieved his change with the economy of movement practised by sailors. He folded up the garments as they were discarded, passed a line of cord round them, made an appropriate knot and gave the bundle to Fox, who wrote out a receipt for it.

Syce tied his dressing-gown cord with a savage jerk.

“No return,” Alleyn remarked, “of the ailment?”

Syce did not reply.

Alleyn said, “Why not tell me about it? You must know damn’ well that I can’t cut all this background stuff dead. Why the devil did you pretend to have lumbago last evening? Was it for the love of a lady?”

It would be inaccurate to say that Commander Syce blushed, since his face, throughout the interview, had been suffused. But at this juncture it certainly darkened to an alarming degree.

“Well, was it?” Alleyn insisted on a note of exasperation. Fox clapped the bundle of clothes down on a table.

“I know what it’s like,” Commander Syce began incomprehensibly. He moved his hand in the direction of Hammer Farm. “Lonely as hell. Poor little Kit. Suppose she wanted security. Natural. Ever seen that play? I believe they put it on again a year or two ago. I don’t go in for poodle-faking, but it was damn’ true. In the end she pitched herself out of a top window, poor thing. Frozen out. County.”

“Can you mean The Second Mrs. Tanqueray?”

“I daresay. And they’d better change their course or she’ll do the same thing. Lonely. I know what it’s like.”

His gaze travelled to a corner cupboard. “You have to do something,” he said and then eyed the tumbler on his luncheon table. “No good offering you a drink,” he mumbled.

“None in the world, worse luck.”

“Well,” Syce said. He added something that sounded like “luck” and suddenly drained the tumbler.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’m thinking of giving it up myself. Alcohol.”

“It’s a ‘good familiar creature,’ ” Alleyn quoted, “ ‘if it is well used.’ ”

“That’s all right as far as it goes, but what sort of a perisher,” Syce surprisingly observed, “took the bearings? ‘A nasty little man and a beastly liar into the bargain.’ ”

“True enough. But we’re not, after all, discussing Iago and alcohol but you and lumbago. Why—”

“All right, I heard you before. I’m just thinking what to say.”

He went to the corner cupboard and returned with a half-empty bottle of whisky. “I’ve got to think,” he said. “It’s damn’ ticklish, I’d have you know.” He helped himself to a treble whisky.

“In that case, wouldn’t you do better without that snorter you’ve just poured out?”

“Think so?”

Fox, with his masterly command of the totally unexpected, said, “She would.”

“Who?” shouted Commander Syce looking terrified. He drank half his whisky.

“Miss Kettle.”

“She would what?”

“Think you’d be better without it, sir.”

“She knows what to do,” he muttered, “if she wants to stop me. Or rather she doesn’t. I wouldn’t tell her,” Commander Syce added in a deeper voice than Alleyn could have imagined him to produce, “I wouldn’t mention it to her on any account whatsoever, never.”

“I’m afraid you really are very tight.”

“It’s the last time so early; in future I’m going to wait till the sun’s over the yard-arm. It happens to be a promise.”

“To Miss Kettle?”

“Who else?” Syce said grandly. “Why not?”

“An admirable idea. Was it,” Alleyn asked, “on Miss Kettle’s account, by any chance, that you pretended to have lumbago last evening?”

“Who else’s?” admitted Syce, who appeared to have got into one unchangeable gear. “Why not?”

“Does she know?”

Fox muttered something indistinguishable and Syce said, “She guessed.” He added wretchedly, “We parted brass rags.”

“You had a row about it?” Alleyn ventured.

“Not about that. About that.” He indicated the tumbler. “So I promised. After to-day. Yard-arm.”

“Good luck to it.”

With the swiftest possible movement Alleyn whisked the arrow from the golf bag and held it under Syce’s nose. “Do you know anything about that?” he asked.

“That’s mine. You took it away.”

“No. This is another of your arrows. This was found in Bottom Meadow at the foot of Watt’s Hill. If you examine it, you’ll see there’s a difference.”

Alleyn whipped the cover off the tip of the arrow. “Look,” he said.

Syce stared owlishly at the point.

“Bloody,” he observed.

“Looks like it. What blood? Whose blood?”

Syce thrust his fingers distractedly through his thin hair.

“Cat’s blood,” he said.

This was the selfsame arrow, Commander Syce urged, with which some weeks ago he had inadvertently slain the mother of Thomasina Twitchett. He himself had found the body and in his distress had withdrawn the arrow and cast it from him into the adjacent bushes. He had taken the body to Mr. Phinn, who had refused to accept his explanation and apologies, and they had parted, as Commander Syce again put it, brass rags.

Alleyn asked him if he did not consider it at all dangerous to fire off arrows at random into his neighbours’ spinneys and over them. The reply was confused and shamefaced. More by surmise and conjecture than by any positive means, Alleyn understood Syce to suggest a close relationship between the degree of his potations and the incontinence of his archery. At this juncture he became morose, and they could get no more out of him.

“It appears,” Alleyn said as they drove away, “that when he’s completely plastered, he gets a sort of cupid fixation and looses off his shafts blindly into the landscape with a classic disregard for their billets. It’s a terrifying thought, but I suppose his immediate neighbours have learnt to look after themselves.”

“I’m afraid,” Fox said heavily, “she’s bitten off more than she can chew. I’m afraid so.”

“My dear old Fox, there’s no end to the punishment some women will take.”

“Of course,” Fox said dismally, “in a manner of speaking, she’s trained for it. There is that.”

“I rather think, you know, that she’s one of the sort that has got to have somebody to cosset.”

“I daresay. Whereas, barring the odd bilious turn, I’m never out of sorts. What do we do now, Mr. Alleyn?” Fox continued, dismissing the more intimate theme with an air of finality.

“We can’t do anything really conclusive until we get a lead from Curtis. But we interview George Lacklander all the same, Br’er Fox, and, I hope, lay the ghost of young Ludovic Phinn. It’s half past one. We may as well let them have their luncheon. Let’s see what they can do for us at the Boy and Donkey.”

They ate their cold meat, potato and beetroot with the concentration of men whose meals do not occur as a matter of course but are consumed precariously when chances present themselves. Before they had finished, Dr. Curtis rang up to give an interim report. He now plumped unreservedly for a blow on the temple with a blunt instrument while Colonel Cartarette squatted over his catch. Subsequent injuries had been inflicted with a pointed instrument after he lay on his side, unconscious or possibly already lifeless. The second injury had all but obliterated the first. He was unable with any certainty to name the first instrument, but the second was undoubtedly the shooting-stick. Sir William Roskill had found traces of recently shed blood under the collar of the disk. He was now checking for the blood group.

“I see,” Alleyn said. “And the shooting-stick was used—?”

“My dear chap, in the normal way, one must suppose.”

“Yes, one must, mustn’t one? Deliberately pushed home and sat on. Horrid — awful behavior.”

“Brutal,” Dr. Curtis said dispassionately.

“All the brutality in the world. Has Willy tackled the fish scales?”

“Give him time. But yes, he’s begun. No report yet.”

“We’re going to Nunspardon. Telephone me if there’s anything, Curtis, will you? You or Willy?”

“O.K.”

Alleyn turned away from the telephone to discover Sergeant Bailey waiting for him with the air of morose detachment that meant he had something of interest to impart. He had, in fact, come from a further detailed overhaul of Colonel Cartarette’s study. The bottom drawer on the left of the desk carried an identifiable finger-print of Sir George Lacklander’s.

“I checked it with his grog glass,” Bailey said, looking at his boots. “The drawer seems to have been wiped over, but a dab on the underside must have been missed or something. It’s his all right.”

“Very useful,” Alleyn said.

Fox wore that expression of bland inscrutability that always seemed to grow upon him as a case approached its close. He would listen attentively to witnesses, suspects, colleagues or his chief and would presently glance up and move the focus of his gaze to some distant object of complete unimportance. This mannerism had the same effect as a change of conversation. It was as if Mr. Fox had become rather pleasurably abstracted. To his associates it was a sign of a peculiar wiliness.

“Remove your attention from the far horizon, Br’er Fox,” Alleyn said, “and bring it to bear on the immediate future. We’re going to Nunspardon.”

They were taken there by the Yard driver, who was now released from his duties in Bottom Meadow.

As they drove past the long wall that marked the Nunspardon marches, Fox began to speculate. “Do you suppose that they throw it open to the public? They must, mustn’t they? Otherwise, how do they manage these days?”

“They manage by a freak. Within the last two generations the Lacklanders have won first prizes in world lotteries. I remember because I was still in the Foreign Service when George Lacklander rang the bell in the Calcutta Sweep. In addition to that, they’re fantastically lucky race-horse owners and possess one of the most spectacular collections of private jewels in England, which I suppose they could use as a sort of lucky dip if they felt the draught. Really, they’re one of the few remaining country families who are wealthy through sheer luck.”

“Is that so?” Fox observed mildly. “And Miss Kettle tells me they’ve stood high in the county for something like a thousand years. Never a scandal, she says, but then I daresay she’s partial.”

“I daresay. A thousand years,” Alleyn said dryly, “is a tidy reach even for the allegedly blameless Lacklanders.”

“Well, to Miss Kettle’s knowledge there’s never been the slightest hint of anything past or present.”

“When, for the love of wonder, did you enjoy this cosy chat with Nurse Kettle?”

“Last evening, Mr. Alleyn. When you were in the study, you know, Miss Kettle, who was saying at the time that the Colonel was quite one of the old sort, a real gentleman and so on, mentioned that she and her ladyship had chatted on the subject only that afternoon!” Fox stopped, scraped his chin and became abstracted.

“What’s up? What subject?”

“Well, er — class obligation and that style of thing. It didn’t seem to amount to anything last night, because at that stage no connection had been established with the family.”

“Come on.”

“Miss Kettle mentioned in passing that her ladyship had talked about the — er — the — er — as you might say — the — er — principle of ‘noblesse oblige’ and had let it be known she was very worried.”

“About what?”

“No particular cause was named.”

“And you’re wondering now if she was worried about the prospect of an imminent debunking through Chapter 7 of the blameless Lacklanders?”

“Well, it makes you think,” Fox said.

“So it does,” Alleyn agreed as they turned into the long drive to Nunspardon.

“She being a great lady.”

“Are you reminding me of her character, her social position or what Mr. Phinn calls her avoirdupois?”

“She must be all of seventeen stone,” Fox mused, “and I wouldn’t mind betting the son’ll be the same at her age. Very heavy-built.”

“And damn’ heavy going into the bargain.”

“Mrs. Cartarette doesn’t seem to think so.”

“My dear man, as you have already guessed, he’s the only human being in the district, apart from her husband, who’s sent her out any signals of any kind at all, and he’s sent plenty.”

“You don’t reckon she’s in love with him, though?”

“You never know — never. I daresay he has his ponderous attractions.”

“Ah, well,” Fox said and with an air of freshening himself up stared at a point some distance ahead. It was impossible to guess whether he ruminated upon the tender passion, the character of George Lacklander or the problematical gratitude of Kitty Cartarette. “You never know,” he sighed, “he may even be turning it over in his mind how long he ought to wait before it’ll be all right to propose to her.”

“I hardly think so, and I must say I hope she’s not building on it.”

“You’ve made up your mind, of course,” Fox said after a pause.

“Well, I have, Fox. I can only see one answer that will fit all the evidence, but unless we get the go-ahead sign from the experts in Chyning, we haven’t a case. There we are again.”

They had rounded the final bend in the drive and had come out before the now familiar façade of Nunspardon.

The butler admitted them and contrived to suggest with next to no expenditure of behaviour that Alleyn was a friend of the family and Fox completely invisible. Sir George, he said, was still at luncheon. If Alleyn would step this way, he would inform Sir George. Alleyn, followed by the unmoved Fox, was shown into George Lacklander’s study: the last of the studies they were to visit. It still bore, Alleyn recognized, the imprint of Sir Harold Lacklander’s personality, and he looked with interest at a framed caricature of his erstwhile chief made a quarter of a century ago when Alleyn was a promising young man in the Foreign Service. The drawing revived his memories of Sir Harold Lacklander; of his professional charm, his conformation to type, his sudden flashes of wit and his extreme sensitiveness to criticism. There was a large photograph of George on the desk, and it was strange to see in it, as Alleyn fancied he could, these elements adulterated and transformed by the addition of something that was either stupidity or indifference. Stupidity? Was George, after all, such an ass? It depended, as usual, on “what one meant” by an ass.

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.