Scales of Justice

CHAPTER VI The Willow Grove

Nurse Kettle sat tidily on an armless chair with her feet crossed at the ankles and her hands at the wrists. Her apron was turned up in the regulation manner under her uniform coat, and her regulation hat was on her head. She had just given Alleyn a neat account of her finding of Colonel Cartarette’s body, and Fox, who had taken the notes, was gazing at her with an expression of the liveliest approval.

“That’s all, really,” she said, “except that I had a jolly strong feeling I was being watched. There now!”

Her statement hitherto had been so positively one of fact that they both stared at her in surprise. “And now,” she said, “you’ll think I’m a silly hysterical female because although I thought once that I heard a twig snap and fancied that when a bird flew out of the thicket it was not me who’d disturbed it, I didn’t see anything at all. Not a thing. And yet I thought I was watched. You get it on night duty in a ward. A patient lying awake and staring at you. You always know before you look. Now laugh that away if you like.”

“Who’s laughing?” Alleyn rejoined. “We’re not, are we, Fox?”

“On no account,” Fox said. “I’ve had the same sensation many a time on night beat in the old days, and it always turned out there was a party in a dark doorway having a look at you.”

“Well, fancy!” said the gratified Nurse Kettle.

“I suppose,” Alleyn said, “you know all these people pretty well, don’t you, Miss Kettle? I always think in country districts the Queen’s Nurses are rather like liaison officers.”

Nurse Kettle looked pleased. “Well now,” she said, “we do get to know people. Of course, our duties take us mostly to the ordinary folk, although with the present shortage we find ourselves doing quite a lot for the other sort. They pay the full fee and that helps the Association, so, as long as it’s not depriving the ones who can’t afford it, we take the odd upper-class case. Like me and Lady Lacklander’s toe, for instance.”

“Ah, yes,” Alleyn said, “There’s the toe.” He observed with surprise the expression of enraptured interest in his colleague’s elderly face.

“Septic,” Nurse Kettle said cosily.

“ ’T, ’t, ’t,” said Fox.

“And then again, for example,” Nurse Kettle went on, “I night-nursed the old gentleman. With him when he died, actually. Well, so was the family. And the Colonel, too, as it happens.”

“Colonel Cartarette?” Alleyn asked without laying much stress on it.

“That’s right. Or wait a minute. I’m telling stories. The Colonel didn’t come back into the room. He stayed on the landing with the papers.”

“The papers?”

“The old gentleman’s memoirs they were. The Colonel was to see about publishing them, I fancy, but I don’t really know. The old gentleman was very troubled about them. He couldn’t be content to say goodbye and give up until he’d seen the Colonel. Mind you, Sir Harold was a great man in his day, and his memoirs’ll be very important affairs, no doubt.”

“No doubt. He was a distinguished ambassador.”

“That’s right. Not many of that sort left, I always say. Everything kept up. Quite feudal.”

“Well,” Alleyn said, “there aren’t many families left who can afford to be feudal. Don’t they call them the Lucky Lacklanders?”

“That’s right. Mind, there are some who think the old gentleman overdid it.”

“Indeed?” Alleyn said, keeping his mental fingers crossed. “How?”

“Well, not leaving the grandson anything. Because of him taking up medicine instead of going into the army. Of course, it’ll all come to him in the end, but in the meantime, he has to make do with what he earns, though of course — but listen to me gossiping. Where was I now. Oh, the old gentleman and the memoirs. Well, no sooner had he handed them over than he took much worse and the Colonel gave the alarm. We all went in. I gave brandy. Doctor Mark gave an injection, but it was all over in a minute. ‘Vic,’ he said, ‘Vic, Vic,’ and that was all.” Alleyn repeated, “Vic?” and then was silent for so long that Nurse Kettle had begun to say, “Well, if that’s all I can do…” when he interrupted her.

“I was going to ask you,” he said, “who lives in the house between this one and Mr. Phinn’s?”

Nurse Kettle smiled all over her good-humoured face. “At Uplands?” she said. “Commander Syce, to be sure. He’s another of my victims,” she added and unaccountably turned rather pink. “Down with a bad go of ’bago, poor chap.”

“Out of the picture, then, from our point of view?”

“Yes, if you’re looking for… oh, my gracious,” Nurse Kettle suddenly ejaculated, “here we are at goodness knows what hour of the morning talking away as pleasant as you please and all the time you’re wondering where you’re going to find a murderer. Isn’t that frightful?”

“Don’t let it worry you,” Fox begged her.

Alleyn stared at him.

“Well, of course I’m worried. Even suppose it turns out to have been a tramp. Tramps are people just like other people,” Nurse Kettle said vigorously.

“Is Mr. Phinn one of your patients?” Alleyn asked.

“Not to say patient. I nursed a carbuncle for him years ago. I wouldn’t be getting ideas about him if I were you.”

“In our job,” Alleyn rejoined, “we have to get ideas about everybody.”

“Not about me, I hope and trust.”

Fox made a complicated soothing and scandalized noise in his throat.

Alleyn said, “Miss Kettle, you liked Colonel Cartarette, didn’t you? It was clear from your manner, I thought, that you liked him very much indeed.”

“Well, I did,” she said emphatically. “He was one of the nicest and gentlest souls: a gentleman if ever I saw one. Devoted father. Never said an unkind word about anybody.”

“Not even about Mr. Phinn?”

“Now look here,” she began, then caught herself up. “Listen,” she said; “Mr. Phinn’s eccentric. No use my pretending otherwise for you’ve seen him for yourselves and you’ll hear what others say about him. But there’s no malice. No, perhaps I wouldn’t say there’s no malice exactly, but there’s no real harm in him. Not a scrap. He’s had this tragedy in his life, poor man, and in my opinion he’s never been the same since it happened. Before the war, it was. His only son did away with himself. Shocking thing.”

“Wasn’t the son in the Foreign Service?”

“That’s right. Ludovic was his name, poor chap. Ludovic! I ask you! Nice boy and very clever. He was in some foreign place when it happened. Broke his mother’s heart, they always say, but she was a cardiac, anyway, poor thing. Mr. Phinn never really got over it. You never know, do you?”

“Never. I remember hearing about it,” Alleyn said vaguely. “Wasn’t he one of Sir Harold Lacklander’s young men?”

“That’s right. The old gentleman was a real squire. You know: the old Swevenings families and all that. I think he asked for young Phinn to be sent out to him, and I know he was very cut up when it happened. I daresay he felt responsible.”

“You never know,” Alleyn repeated. “So the Swevenings families,” he added, “tend to gravitate towards foreign parts?”

Nurse Kettle said that they certainly seemed to do so. Apart from young Viccy Danberry-Phinn getting a job in Sir Harold’s embassy, there was Commander Syce, whose ship had been based on Singapore, and the Colonel himself, who had been attached to a number of missions in the Far East, including one at Singapore. Nurse Kettle added, after a pause, that she believed he had met his second wife there.

“Really?” Alleyn said with no display of interest. “At the time when Syce was out there, do you mean?” It was the merest shot in the dark, but it found its mark. Nurse Kettle became pink in the face and said with excessive brightness that she believed that “the Commander and the second Mrs. C.” had known each other out in the East. She added, with an air of cramming herself over some emotional hurdle, that she had seen a very pretty drawing that the Commander had made of Mrs. Cartarette. “You’d pick it out for her at once,” she said. “Speaking likeness, really, with tropical flowers behind and all.”

“Did you know the first Mrs. Cartarette?”

“Well, not to say know. They were only married eighteen months when she died giving birth to Miss Rose. She was an heiress, you know. The whole fortune goes to Miss Rose. It’s well known. The Colonel was quite hard up, but he’s never touched a penny of his first wife’s money. It’s well known,” Nurse Kettle repeated, “so I’m not talking gossip.”

Alleyn skated dexterously on towards Mark Lacklander, and it was obvious that Nurse Kettle was delighted to sing Mark’s praises. Fox, respectfully staring at her, said there was a bit of romance going on there, seemingly, and she at once replied that that was as plain as the noses on all their faces and a splendid thing, too. A real Swevenings romance, she added.

Alleyn said, “You do like to keep yourselves to yourselves in this district, don’t you?”

“Well,” Nurse Kettle chuckled, “I daresay we do. As I was saying to a gentleman patient of mine, we’re rather like one of those picture-maps. Little world of our own, if you know what I mean. I was suggesting…” Nurse Kettle turned bright pink and primmed up her lips. “Personally,” she added rather obscurely, “I’m all for the old families and the old ways of looking at things.”

“Now, it strikes me,” Fox said, raising his brows in bland surprise, “and mind, I may be wrong, very likely I am, but it strikes me that the present Mrs. Cartarette belongs to quite a different world. Much more mondaine, if you’ll overlook the faulty accent, Miss Kettle.”

Miss Kettle muttered something that sounded like “demi-mondaine” and hurried on. “Well, I daresay we’re a bit stodgy in our ways in the Vale,” she said, “and she’s been used to lots of gaiety and there you are.” She stood up. “If there’s nothing more,” she said, “I’ll just have a word with the doctor and see if there’s anything I can do for Miss Rose or her stepmother before they settle down.”

“There’s nothing more here. We’ll ask you to sign a statement about finding the body, and, of course, you’ll be called at the inquest.”

“I suppose so.” She got up and the two men also rose. Alleyn opened the door. She looked from one to the other.

“It won’t be a Vale man,” she said. “We’re not a murderous lot in the Vale. You may depend upon it.”

Alleyn and Fox contemplated each other with the absent-minded habit of long association.

“Before we see Dr. Lacklander,” Alleyn said, “let’s take stock, Br’er Fox. What are you thinking about?” he added.

“I was thinking,” Fox said with his customary simplicity, “about Miss Kettle. A very nice woman.”

Alleyn stared at him. “You are not by any chance transfixed by Dan Cupid’s dart?”

“Ah,” Fox said complacently, “that would be the day, wouldn’t it, Mr. Alleyn? I like a nice compact woman,” he added.

“Drag your fancy away from thoughts of Nurse Kettle’s contours, compact or centrifugal, and consider. Colonel Cartarette left this house about ten past seven to call on Octavius Danberry-Phinn. Presumably there was no one at home, because the next we hear of him he’s having a violent row with Phinn down by the bottom bridge. That’s at about half past seven. At twenty to eight he and Phinn part company. The Colonel crosses the bridge and at twenty minutes to eight is having an interview with Lady Lacklander, who is sketching in a hollow on the left bank almost opposite the willow grove on the right bank. Apparently this alfresco meeting was by arrangement. It lasted about ten minutes. At ten to eight Cartarette left Lady Lacklander, re-crossed the bridge, turned left and evidently went straight into the willow grove because she saw him there as she herself panted up the hill to Nunspardon. Soon after eight Mrs. Cartarette said goodbye to that prize ass George Lacklander and came down the hill. At about a quarter past seven she and he had seen old Phinn poaching, and as she tripped down the path, she looked along his fishing to see if she could spot him anywhere. She must have just missed Lady Lacklander, who, one supposes, had by that time plunged into this Nunspardon Home Spinney they talk so much about. Kitty…”

Fox said, “Who?”

“Her’s name’s Kitty, Kitty Cartarette. She came hipping and thighing down the hill with her eye on the upper reaches of the Chyne, where she expected to see Mr. Phinn. She didn’t notice her husband in the willow grove, but that tells us nothing until we get a look at the landscape, and anyway, her attention, she says, was elsewhere. She continued across the bridge and so home. She saw nothing unusual on the bridge. Now Lady Lacklander saw a woundy great trout lying on the bridge where, according to Lady L., Mr. Phinn had furiously chucked it when he had his row, thirty-five minutes earlier, with Colonel Cartarette. The next thing that happens is that Mark Lacklander (who has been engaged in tennis and, one supposes, rather solemn dalliance with that charming girl Rose Cartarette) leaves this house round about the time Mrs. Cartarette returns to it and goes down to the bottom bridge, where he does not find a woundy great trout and is certain that there was no trout to find. He does however, find his grandmother’s sketching gear on the left bank of the Chyne and like a kind young bloke carries it back to Nunspardon, thus saving the footman a trip. He disappears into the spinney, and as far as we know, this darkling valley is left to itself until a quarter to nine when Nurse Kettle, who has been slapping Commander Syce’s lumbago next door, descends into Bottom Meadow, turns off to the right, hears the dog howling and discovers the body. Those are the facts, if they are facts, arising out of information received up to date. What emerges?”

Fox dragged his palm across his jaw. “For a secluded district,” he said, “there seems to have been quite a bit of traffic in the valley of the Chyne.”

“Doesn’t there? Down this hill. Over the bridge. Up the other hill and t’other way round. None of them meeting except the murdered man and old Phinn at half past seven and the murdered man and Lady Lacklander ten minutes later. Otherwise it seems to have been a series of near misses on all hands. I can’t remember the layout of the valley with any accuracy, but it appears that from the houses on this side only the upper reaches of the Chyne and a few yards below the bridge on the right bank are visible. We’ll have to do an elaborate check as soon as it’s light, which is hellish soon, by the way. Unless we find signs of angry locals hiding in the underbrush or of mysterious coloured gentlemen from the East lurking in the village, it’s going to look a bit like a small field of suspects.”

“Meaning this lot,” Fox said with a wag of his head in the direction of the drawing-room.

“There’s not a damn’ one among them except the nurse who isn’t holding something back; I’ll swear there isn’t. Let’s have a word with young Lacklander, shall we? Fetch him in, Foxkin, and while you’re there, see how Mr. Phinn’s getting on with his statement to the sergeant. I wanted an ear left in that room, the sergeant’s was the only one available and the statement seemed the best excuse for planting him there. We’ll have to go for dabs on those spectacles we picked up, and I swear they’ll be Mr. Phinn’s. If he’s got off his chest as much as he’s decided to tell us, let him go home. Ask him to remain on tap, though, until further notice. Away you go.”

While Fox was away, Alleyn looked more closely at Colonel Cartarette’s study. He thought he found in it a number of interesting divergences from the accepted convention. True, there were leather saddleback chairs, a pipe-rack and a regimental photograph, but instead of sporting prints the Colonel had chosen half a dozen Chinese drawings, and the books that lined two of his walls, although they included army lists and military biographies, were for the greater part well-worn copies of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and poets with one or two very rare items on angling. With these Alleyn was interested to find a sizable book with the title The Scaly Breed by Maurice Cartarette. It was a work on the habits and characteristics of fresh-water trout. On his desk was a photograph of Rose, looking shy and misty, and one of Kitty looking like an imitation of something it would be difficult to define.

Alleyn’s gaze travelled over the surface of the desk and down the front. He tried the drawers. The top pair were unlocked and contained only writing paper and envelopes and a few notes written in a distinguished hand, evidently by the Colonel himself. The centre pairs on each side were locked. The bottom left-hand drawer pulled out. It was empty. His attention was sharpened. He had stooped down to look more closely at it when he heard Fox’s voice in the hall. He pushed the drawer to and stood away from the desk.

Mark Lacklander came in with Fox.

Alleyn said, “I shan’t keep you long; indeed I have only asked you to come in to clear up one small point and to help us with another, not so small. The first question is this: when you went home at quarter past eight last evening, did you hear a dog howling in Bottom Meadow?”

“No,” Mark said. “No, I’m sure I didn’t.”

“Did Skip really stick close to the Colonel?”

“Not when he was fishing,” Mark said at once. “The Colonel had trained him to keep a respectful distance away.”

“But you didn’t see Skip?”

“I didn’t see or hear a dog but I remember meeting a tabby cat. One of Occy Phinn’s menagerie, I imagine, on an evening stroll.”

“Where was she?”

“This side of the bridge,” said Mark, looking bored.

“Right. Now, you’d been playing tennis here, hadn’t you, with Miss Cartarette, and you returned to Nunspardon by the bottom bridge and river path. You collected your grandmother’s sketching gear on the way, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Were you carrying anything else?”

“Only my tennis things. Why?”

“I’m only trying to get a picture. Collecting these things must have taken a few moments. Did you hear or see anything at all out of the ordinary?”

“Nothing. I don’t think I looked across the river at all.”

“Right. And now will you tell us, as a medical man, what you make of the injuries to the head?”

Mark said very readily, “Yes, of course, for what my opinion’s worth on a superficial examination.”

“I gather,” Alleyn said, “that you went down with Miss Kettle after she gave the alarm and that with exemplary economy you lifted up the tweed hat, looked at the injury, satisfied yourself that he was dead, replaced the hat and waited for the arrival of the police. That it?”

“Yes. I had a torch and I made as fair an examination as I could without touching him. As a matter of fact, I was able to look pretty closely at the injuries.”

“Injuries,” Alleyn repeated, stressing the plural. “Then you would agree that he was hit more than once?”

“I’d like to look again before giving an opinion. It seemed to me he had been hit on the temple with one instrument before he was stabbed through it with another. Although — I don’t know — a sharp object striking the temple could of itself produce very complex results. It’s useless to speculate. Your man will no doubt make a complete examination and what he finds may explain the appearances that to me are rather puzzling.”

“But on what you saw your first reaction was to wonder if he’d been stunned before he was stabbed? Is that right?”

“Yes,” Mark said readily. “That’s right.”

“As I saw it,” Alleyn said, “there seemed to be an irregular bruised area roughly about three by two inches and inside that a circular welt that might have been made by a very big hammer with a concave striking surface, if such a thing exists. And inside that again is the actual puncture, a hole that, it seemed to me, must have been made by a sharply pointed instrument.”

“Yes,” Mark said, “that’s an accurate description of the superficial appearance. But, of course, the queerest appearances can follow cranial injuries.”

“The autopsy may clear up the ambiguities,” Alleyn said. He glanced at Mark’s intelligent and strikingly handsome face. He decided to take a risk.

“Look here,” he said, “it’s no good us trying to look as if we’re uninterested in Mr. Danberry-Phinn. He and Colonel Cartarette had a flaming row less than an hour, probably, before Cartarette was murdered. What do you feel about that? I don’t have to tell you this is entirely off the record. What sort of a chap is Mr. Phinn? You must know him pretty well.”

Mark thrust his hands into his pockets and scowled at the floor. “I don’t know him as well as all that,” he said. “I mean, I’ve known him all my life, of course, but he’s old enough to be my father and not likely to be much interested in a medical student or a young practitioner.”

“Your father would know him better, I suppose.”

“As a Swevenings man and my father’s elder contemporary, yes, but they hadn’t much in common.”

“You knew his son, Ludovic, of course?”

“Oh, yes,” Mark said composedly. “Not well,” he added; “he was at Eton and I’m a Wykehamist. He trained for the Diplomatic, and I left Oxford for the outer darkness of the dissecting rooms at Thomas’s. Completely déclassé. I dare say,” Mark added, with a grin, “that my grandfather thought much the same about you, sir. Didn’t you desert him and the Diplomatic for Lord Trenchard and the lonely beat?”

“If you like to put it that way, which is a good deal more flattering to me than it is to either of my great white chiefs. Young Phinn, by the way, was at your grandfather’s embassy in Zlomce, wasn’t he?”

“H «was,” Mark said, and as if he realized that this reply sounded uncomfortably short, he added, “My grandfather was a terrific ‘Vale Man,’ as we say in these parts. He liked to go all feudal and surround himself with local people. When Viccy Phinn went into the Service, I fancy grandfather asked if he could have him with the idea of making one corner of a Zlomcefield forever Swevenings. My God,” Mark added, “I didn’t mean to put it like that. I mean…”

“You’ve remembered, perhaps, that young Phinn blew out his brains in one corner of a Zlomce field.”

“You knew about that?”

“It must have been a great shock to your grandfather.”

Mark compressed his lips and turned away. “Naturally,” he said. He pulled out a case and still with his back to Alleyn lit himself a cigarette. The match scraped and Fox cleared his throat.

“I believe,” Alleyn said, “that Sir Harold’s autobiography is to be published.”

Mark said, “Did Phinn tell you that?”

“Now, why in the wide world,” Alleyn asked, “should Mr. Octavius Phinn tell me?”

There was a long silence broken by Mark.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Mark said. “I must decline absolutely to answer any more questions.”

“You are perfectly within your rights. It’s not so certain that you are wise to do so.”

“After all,” Mark said, “I must judge of that for myself. Is there any objection now to my driving to the dispensary?”

Alleyn hesitated for the fraction of a second. “No objection in the world,” he said. “Good morning to you, Dr. Lacklander.”

Mark repeated, “I’m sorry,” and with a troubled look at both of them went out of the room.

“Br’er Fox,” Alleyn said, “we shall snatch a couple of hours sleep at the Boy and Donkey, but before we do so, will you drag your fancy away from thoughts of District Nurses and bend it upon the bottom drawer on the left-hand side of Colonel Cartarette’s desk?”

Fox raised his eyebrows, stationed himself before the desk, bent his knees, placed his spectacles across his nose and did as he was bidden.

“Forced,” he said. “Recent. Chipped.”

“Quite so. The chip’s on the floor. The paper knife on the desk is also chipped and the missing bit is in the otherwise empty drawer. The job’s been done unhandily by an amateur in a hurry. We’ll seal this room and to-morrow we’ll put in the camera-and-dabs boys. Miss Kettle’s, Mr. Phinn’s and Dr. Lacklander’s prints’ll be on their statements. Lacklander’s and Mrs. Cartarette’s grog glasses had better be rescued and locked up in here. If we want dabs from the others, we’ll pick them up in the morning.” He took a folded handkerchief from his pocket, put it on the desk and opened it up. A pair of cheap spectacles was revealed. “And before we go to bed,” he said, “we’ll discover if Mr. Danberry-Phinn has left his dabs on his reach-me-down specs. And in the morning, Foxkin, if you are a good boy, you shall be told the sad and cautionary story of Master Ludovic Phinn.”

Kitty Cartarette lay in a great Jacobean bed. She had asked, when she was first married, to have it done over in quilted and buttoned peach velvet, but had seen at once that this would be considered an error in taste. Anxious at that time to establish her position, she had given up this idea, but the dressing-table and chairs and lamp had all been her own choice. She stared miserably at them now, and a fanciful observer might have found something valedictory in her glance. By shifting across the bed, she was able to see herself in her long glass. The pink silk sheet billowed up round her puffed and tear-stained face. “I do look a sight,” she muttered. She may have then remembered that she lay in her husband’s place, and if a coldness came over her at this recollection, nobody in Swevenings would have suggested that it was because she had ever really loved him. Lady Lacklander had remarked, indeed, that Kitty was one of those rare women who seem to get through life without forming a deep attachment to anybody, and Lady Lacklander would have found it difficult to say why Kitty had been weeping. It would not have occurred to her to suppose that Kitty was lonelier than she had ever been before, but merely that she suffered from shock, which, of course, was true.

There was a tap on the door and this startled Kitty. Maurice, with his queer old-fashioned delicacy, had always tapped.

“Hullo?” she said.

The door opened and Rose came in. In her muslin dressing-gown and with her hair drawn into a plait she looked like a school-girl. Her eyelids, like Kitty’s, were swollen and pink, but even this disfigurement, Kitty noticed with vague resentment, didn’t altogether blot out Rose’s charm. Kitty supposed she ought to have done a bit more about Rose. “But I can’t think of everything,” she told herself distractedly.

Rose said, “Kitty, I hope you don’t mind my coming in. I couldn’t get to sleep and I came out and saw the light under your door. Mark’s fetching me some sleeping things from Chyning and I wondered if you’d like one.”

“I’ve got some things of my own, thanks all the same. Has everybody gone?”

“Lady Lacklander and George have and, I think, Occy Phinn. Would you like Mark to look in?”

“What for?”

“You might find him sort of helpful,” Rose said in a shaky voice. “I do.”

“I daresay,” Kitty rejoined dryly. She saw Rose blush faintly. “It was nice of you to think of it, but I’m all right. What about the police? Are they still making themselves at home in your father’s study?” Kitty asked.

“I think they must have gone. They’re behaving awfully well, really, Kitty. I mean it is a help, Mr. Alleyn being a gent.”

“I daresay,” Kitty said again. “O.K., Rose,” she added. “Don’t worry. I know.”

Her manner was good-naturedly dismissive, but Rose still hesitated. After a pause she said, “Kitty, while I’ve been waiting — for Mark to come back, you know — I’ve been thinking. About the future.”

“The future?” Kitty repeated and stared at her. “I should have thought the present was enough!”

“I can’t think about that,” Rose said quickly. “Not yet. Not about Daddy. But it came into my mind that it was going to be hard on you. Perhaps you don’t realize — I don’t know if he told you, but — well—”

“Oh, yes,” Kitty said wearily, “I know. He did tell me. He was awfully scrupulous about anything to do with money, wasn’t he?” She looked up at Rose. “O.K., Rose,” she said. “Not to fuss. I’ll make out. I wasn’t expecting anything. My sort,” she added obscurely, “don’t.”

“But I wanted to tell you; you needn’t worry. Not from any financial point of view. I mean — it’s hard to say and perhaps I should wait till we’re more used to what’s happened, but I want to help,” Rose stammered. She began to speak rapidly. It was almost as if she had reached that point of emotional exhaustion that is akin to drunkenness. Her native restraint seemed to have forsaken her and to have been replaced by an urge to pour out some kind of sentiment upon somebody. She appeared scarcely to notice her stepmother as an individual. “You see,” she was saying, weaving her fingers together, “I might as well tell you. I shan’t need Hammer for very long. Mark and I are going to be engaged.”

Kitty looked up at her, hesitated, and then said, “Well, that’s fine, isn’t it? I do hope you’ll be awfully happy. Of course, I’m not exactly surprised.”

“No,” Rose agreed. “I expect we’ve been terribly transparent.” Her voice trembled and her eyes filled with réitérant tears. “Daddy knew,” she said.

“Yes,” Kitty agreed with a half-smile. “I told him.”

“You did?”

It was as if Rose was for the first time positively aware of her stepmother.

“You needn’t mind,” Kitty said. “It was natural enough. I couldn’t help noticing.”

“We told him ourselves,” Rose muttered.

“Was he pleased? Look, Rose,” Kitty said, still in that half-exhausted, half-good-natured manner, “don’t let’s bother to hedge. I know about the business over Old Man Lacklander’s memoirs.”

Rose made a slight distasteful movement. “I hadn’t thought of it,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

“No,” Kitty agreed, “in a way, I suppose it doesn’t — now. What’s the matter?”

Rose’s chin had gone up. “I think I hear Mark,” she said.

She went to the door.

“Rose,” Kitty said strongly, and Rose stopped short. “I know it’s none of my business but — you’re all over the place now. We all are. I wouldn’t rush anything! ‘Don’t rush your fences,’ that’s what your father would have said, isn’t it?”

Rose looked at Kitty with an air of dawning astonishment. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “What fences?”

She had opened the door. A well-kept hand came round it and closed over hers.

“Hallo?” Mark’s voice said. “May I come in?”

Rose looked at Kitty, who again hesitated. “Why, yes,” she said. “Of course. Come in, Mark.”

He was really a very handsome young man: tall, dark and with enough emphasis in his mouth and jaw to give him the masterful air that is supposed to be so irrestible to women. He stood looking down at Kitty with Rose’s hand drawn through his arm. They made what used to be known as a striking couple.

“I heard your voices,” he said, “and thought I’d look in. Is there anything I can do at all? I’ve bought some things for Rose to help her get to sleep; if you’d like to take one, it might be quite an idea.”

“I’ll see,” she said. “I’ve got something, actually, somewhere.”

“Shall we leave one in case?” Mark suggested. He shook a couple of capsules from a packet onto her bedside table and fetched a glass of water. “One is enough,” he said.

He was standing above Kitty and between her and Rose, who had not moved from the door at the far end of the room. Kitty looked up into his face and said loudly, “You were the first there, weren’t you?”

Mark made a slight admonitory gesture and turned towards Rose. “Not actually the first,” he said quietly. “Miss Kettle—”

“Oh — old Kettle,” Kitty said irritably, dismissing her. “What I want to know — after all, I am his wife — what happened?”

“Rose,” Mark said. “You run along to bed.”

“No, Mark darling,” Rose said, turning deadly white. “I want to know, too. Please. It’s worse not to.”

“Yes, much worse,” Kitty agreed. “Always.”

Mark waited for an appreciable time and then said quickly, “Well first of all — there’s no disfigurement to his face—”

Kitty made a sharp grimace and Rose put her hands to her eyes.

“—and I don’t think he felt anything at all,” Mark said. He lifted a finger. “All right. It was a blow. Here. On the temple.”

“That—?” Rose said. “Just that?”

“It’s a very vulnerable part, darling.”

“Then — might it be some sort of accident?”

“Well — no, I’m afraid not.”

“O, Mark, why not?”

“It’s out of the question, Rose darling.”

“But why?”

“The nature of the injuries.”

“More than one?” she said. He went quickly to her and took her hands in his.

“Well — yes.”

“But you said—” Rose began.

“You see, there are several injuries all in that one small area. It wouldn’t do any good if I let you think they might have been caused accidentally, because the — the pathologist will certainly find that they were not.”

Kitty, unnoticed, said, “I see,” and added abruptly, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can take any more to-night. D’you mind?”

Mark looked at her with sharpened interest. “You should try to settle down.” He lifted her wrist professionally.

“No, no,” she said and drew it away. “That’s unnecessary, thanks all the same. But I do think Rose ought to go to bed before she drops in her tracks.”

“I quite agree,” Mark said again, rather coldly, and opened the door. Rose said, “Yes, I’m going; I hope you do manage to sleep, Kitty,” and went out. Mark followed her to her own door.

“Mark, darling, good-night,” Rose said. She freed herself gently.

“To-morrow,” he said, “I’m going to carry you off to Nunspardon.”

“Oh,” she said, “no — I don’t think we can quite do that, do you? Why Nunspardon?”

“Because I want to look after you and because, making all due allowances, I don’t think your stepmother’s particularly sympathetic or congenial company for you,” Mark Lacklander said, frowning.

“It’s all right,” Rose said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve learned not to notice.”

Fox was duly acquainted with the story of Ludovic Phinn over a breakfast of ham and eggs in the parlour of the Boy and Donkey shortly after dawn. Bailey and Thompson, who had also spent the tag end of the night at the pub, were already afoot in Bottom Meadow with the tools of their trade, and the Home Office pathologist was expected from London. The day promised to be fine and warm.

“I know about young Phinn,” Alleyn said, “because his debacle occurred when I was doing a spell in the Special Branch in 1937. At that time the late Sir Harold Lacklander was our Ambassador at Zlomce, and Master Danberry-Phinn was his personal secretary. It was known that the German Government was embarked on a leisurely and elaborate parly with the local government over railway concessions. We picked up information to the effect that the German boys were prepared to sign an important and, to us, disastrous undertaking in the fairly distant future. Lacklander was instructed to throw a spanner in the works. He was empowered to offer the Zlomce boys certain delectable concessions, and it was fully expected that they would play. The Germans, however, learnt of his little plot and immediately pressed on their own negotiations to a successful and greatly accelerated conclusion. Our government wanted to know why. Lacklander realized that there had been a leakage of information and, since there was nobody else in a position to let the leakage occur, he tackled young Phinn, who at once broke down and admitted that it was his doing. It seems that he had not been able to assimilate his Zlomce oats too well. It’s an old and regrettable story. He arrived with his alma mater’s milk wet on his lips, full of sophisticated backchat and unsophisticated thinking. He made some very dubious Zlomce chums, among whom was a young gent whom we afterwards found to be a German agent of a particularly persuasive sort. He was said to have fastened on young Phinn, who became completely sold on the Nazi formula and agreed to act for the Germans. As usual, our sources of information were in themselves dubious. Phinn was judged on results, and undoubtedly he behaved like a traitor. On the night after a crucial cable had come through for his chief, he went off to the gypsies or somewhere with his Nazi friend. The decoding of the cable had been entrusted to him. It developed that he presented his Zlomce chums with the whole story. It was said afterwards that he’d taken bribes. Lacklander gave him bottled hell, and he went away and blew his brains out. We were told that he’d had a kind of hero-fixation on Lacklander, and we always thought it odd that he should have behaved as he did. But he was, I believe, a brilliant but unbalanced boy, an only child whose father, the Octavius we saw last night, expected him to retrieve the fortunes of their old and rather reduced family. His mother died a few months afterwards, I believe.”

“Sad,” said Mr. Fox.

“It was indeed.”

“Would you say, Mr. Alleyn, now, that this Mr. Phinn, Sr., was slightly round the bend?”

“Dotty?”

“Well — eccentric.”

“His behaviour in the watches of last night was certainly oddish. He was a frightened man, Fox, if I ever saw one. What do you think?”

“The opportunity was there,” Fox said, going straight to the first principle of police investigation.

“It was. And, by the way, Bailey’s done his dab-drill. The spectacles are Mr. Danberry-Phinn’s.”

“There now!” Fox ejaculated with the utmost satisfaction.

“It’s not conclusive, you know. He might have lost them down there earlier in the day. He’d still be very chary of owning to them.”

“Well…” Fox said sceptically.

“I quite agree. I’ve got my own idea about when and how they got there, which is this.”

He propounded his idea. Fox listened with raised brows.

“And as for opportunity, Fox,” Alleyn went on, “as far as we’ve got, it was also there for his wife, all three Lacklanders and, for a matter of that, Nurse Kettle herself.”

Fox opened his mouth, caught a derisive glint in his senior’s eye and shut it again.

“Of course,” Alleyn said, “we can’t exclude the tramps or even the dark-skinned stranger from the Far East. But there’s one item that emerged last night which I don’t think we can afford to disregard, Fox. It seems that Colonel Cartarette was entrusted by Sir Harold Lacklander, then on his deathbed, with the Lacklander memoirs. He was to supervise their publication.”

“Well, now,” Fox began, “I can’t say…”

“This item may be of no significance whatever,” Alleyn rejoined. “On the other hand, isn’t it just possible that it may be a link between the Lacklanders on the one hand and Mr. Octavius Phinn on the other, that link being provided by Colonel Cartarette with the memoirs in his hands.”

“I take it,” Fox said in his deliberate way, “that you’re wondering if there’s a full account of young Phinn’s offence in the memoirs and if his father’s got to know of it and made up his mind to stop publication.”

“It sounds hellish thin when you put it like that, doesn’t it? Where does such a theory land us? Cartarette goes down the hill at twenty past seven, sees Phinn poaching, and, overheard by Lady Lacklander, has a flaming row with him. They part company. Cartarette moves on to talk to Lady Lacklander, stays with her for ten minutes and then goes to the willow grove to fish. Lady L. returns home and Phinn comes back and murders Cartarette because Cartarette is going to publish old Lacklander’s memoirs to the discredit of young Phinn’s name. But Lady L. doesn’t say a word about this to me. She doesn’t say she heard them quarrel about the memoirs, although, if they did, there’s no reason that I can see why she wouldn’t. She merely says that they had a row about poaching and that Cartarette talked about this to her. She adds that he and she also discussed a private and domestic business which had nothing to do with Cartarette’s death. This, of course, is as it may be. Could the private and domestic business by any chance be anything to do with the publication of the memoirs? If so, why should she refuse to discuss it with me?”

“Have we any reason to think it might be about these memoirs, though?”

“No. I’m doing what I always say you shouldn’t do. I’m speculating. But it was clear, wasn’t it, that young Lacklander didn’t like the memoirs being mentioned. He shut up like a trap over them. They crop up, Br’er Fox. They occur. They link the Cartarettes with the Lacklanders, and they may well link Mr. Phinn with both. They provide, so far, the only, connecting theme in this group of apparently very conventional people.”

“I wouldn’t call her ladyship conventional,” Fox observed.

“She’s unconventional along orthodox lines, believe me. There’s a car pulling up. It’ll be Dr. Curtis. Let’s return to the bottom field and to the question of opportunity and evidence.”

But before he led the way out, he stood rubbing his nose and staring at his colleague.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “That old Lacklander died with what sounds like an uneasy conscience and the word ‘Vic’ on his lips.”

“Ah. Vic.”

“Yes. And Mark Lacklander referred to young Phinn as Viccy! Makes you fink, don’t it? Come on.”

By mid-summer morning light, Colonel Cartarette looked incongruous in the willow grove. His coverings had been taken away and there, close to the river’s brink, he was: curled up, empty of thought and motion, wearing the badge of violence upon his temple… a much photographed corpse. Bailey and Thompson had repeated the work of the previous night but without, Alleyn thought, a great deal of success. Water had flooded under duck boards, seeped up through earthy places soaked into Colonel Cartarette’s Harris tweeds and had collected in a pool in the palm of his right hand.

Dr. Curtis completed a superficial examination and stood up.

“That’s all I want here, Alleyn,” he said. “I’ve given Oliphant the contents of the pockets. A bundle of keys, tobacco, pipe, lighter. Fly case. Handkerchief. Pocket book with a few notes and a photograph of his daughter. That’s all. As for general appearances: rigor is well established and is, I think, about to go off. I understand you’ve found out that he was alive up to quarter past eight and that he was found dead at nine. I won’t get any closer in time than that.”

“The injuries?”

“I’d say, tentatively, two weapons, or possibly one weapon used in two ways. There’s a clean puncture with deep penetration, there’s a circular indentation with the puncture as its centre, and there’s been a heavy blow over the same area that has apparently caused extensive fracturing and a lot of extravasation. It might have been made by one of those stone-breaker’s hammers or even by a flat oval-shaped stone itself. I think it was the first injury he got. It would almost certainly have knocked him right out. Might have killed him. In any case it would have left him wide open to the second attack.”

Alleyn had moved round the body to the edge of the stream.

“And no prints?” he said looking at Bailey.

“There’s prints from the people that found him,” Bailey said, “clear enough. Man and woman. Overlapping and straight forward… walk towards, squat down, stand, walk away. And there’s his own heel marks, Mr. Alleyn, as you noticed last night. Half filled with surface drainage they were then, but you can see how he was, clear enough.”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “Squatting on a bit of soft ground. Facing the stream. He’d cut several handfuls of grass with his knife and was about to wrap up that trout. There’s the knife, there’s the grass in his hands, and there’s the trout! A whopper if ever there was one. Sergeant Oliphant says the Colonel himself hooked and lost him some days ago.”

He stooped and slipped an exploratory finger into the trout’s maw. “Ah, yes,” he said, “it’s still there. We’d better have a look at it.”

His long fingers were busy for a minute. Presently they emerged from the jaws of the Old ’Un with a broken cast. “That’s not a standard commercial fly,” he said. “It’s a beautiful home-made one. Scraps of red feather and gold cloth bound with bronze hair, and I think I’ve seen its mates in the Colonel’s study. Rose Cartarette tied the flies for her father, and I fancy this is the one he lost when he hooked the Old ’Un on the afternoon before Sir Harold Lacklander’s death.”

Alleyn looked at the Colonel’s broken head and blankly acquiescent face. “But you didn’t hook him this time,” he said, “and why in the world should you shout, at half past seven, that you wouldn’t be seen dead with him, and be found dead with him at nine?”

He turned towards the stream. The willow grove sheltered a sort of miniature harbour with its curved bank going sheer down to the depth of about five feet at the top end of the little bay and running out in a stony shelf at the lower end. The stream poured into this bay with a swirling movement, turning back upon its course.

Alleyn pointed to the margin of the lower bank of the bay. It carried an indented scar running horizontally below the lip.

“Look here, Fox,” Alleyn said, “and here, above it.” He nodded at a group of tall daisies, strung along the edge of the bank up-stream from where the Colonel lay and perhaps a yard from his feet. They were in flower. Alleyn pointed to three leggy stems, taller than their fellows, from which the blooms had been cut away.

“You can move him,” he said. “But don’t tramp over the ground more than you can help. We may want another peer at it. And, by the way, Fox, have you noticed that inside the willow grove, near the point of entry, there’s a flattened patch of grass and several broken and bent twigs? Remember that Nurse Kettle thought she was observed. Go ahead, Oliphant.”

Sergeant Oliphant and P. C. Gripper came forward with a stretcher. They put it down some distance from the body, which they now raised. As they did so, a daisy head, crumpled and sodden, dropped from the coat.

“Pick it up, tenderly,” Alleyn said as he did so, “and treat it with care. We must find the other two if we can. This murderer said it with flowers.” He put it away in his case. Oliphant and Gripper laid the body on the stretcher and waited.

Alleyn found a second daisy on the bank below the point where Colonel Cartarette’s head had lain. “The third,” he said, “may have gone down-stream, but we’ll see.”

He now looked at Colonel Cartarette’s rod, squatting beside it where it rested on the bank, its point overhanging the stream. Alleyn lifted the cast, letting it dangle from his long fingers. “The fellow of the one that the Old ’Un broke for him,” he said.

He looked more closely at the cast and sniffed at it.

“He hooked a fish yesterday,” he said; “there’s a flake of flesh on the barb. Where, then, is this trout he caught? Too small? Did he chuck it back? Or what? Damn this ruined ground.” He separated the cast from the line and put it away in his case. He sniffed into the dead curved hands. “Yes,” he said, “he’s handled a fish. We’ll go over the hands, fingernails and clothes for any more traces. Keep that tuft of grass that’s in his hand. Where’s the rest of it?”

He turned back to the riverbank and gathered up every blade of grass that was scattered where the Colonel had cut it. He examined the Colonel’s pocket knife and found that, in addition to having traces of grass, it smelt of fish. Then he very cautiously lifted the Old ’Un and examined the patch of stones where the great fish had lain all night.

“Traces there, all right,” he said. “Are they all off this one fish, however? Look, there’s a sharp flinty bit of stone with a flap of fish skin on it. Now let’s see.”

He turned the great trout over and searched its clamminess for a sign of a missing piece of skin and could find none. “This looks more like business,” he muttered and took out his pocket lens. His subordinates coughed and shifted their feet. Fox watched him with calm approval.

“Well,” Alleyn said at last, “we’ll have to get an expert’s opinion and it may be crucial. But it’s pretty clear that he made a catch of his own, that it lay on this patch, that a bit of its skin was torn off on this stone, that the fish itself was subsequently removed and the Old ’Un put in its place. It doesn’t look as if it was chucked back in the stream, does it? In that case he would have taken it off his hook and thrown it back at once. He wouldn’t have laid it down on the bank. And why was a flap of its skin scraped off on the stone? And why was the Old ’Un laid over the trace of the other fish? And by whom? And when?”

Fox said, “As for when: before the rain at all events. The ground shows that.”

“That doesn’t help, since he was killed before the rain and found before the rain. But consider, Br’er Fox, he was killed with a tuft of cut grass in his hand. Isn’t it at least possible that he was cutting his grass to wrap up his own catch? He had refused to touch the Old ’Un and had left it lying on the bridge. The people who knew him best all agree he’d stick to his word. All right. Somebody kills him. Is it that ‘somebody’ who takes the Colonel’s fish and replaces it with the Old ’Un?”

“You’d think so, Mr. Alleyn, wouldn’t you?”

“And why did he do it?”

“Gawd knows!” said Oliphant in disgust. Sergeants Bailey and Thompson and P. C. Gripper made sympathetic noises. Dr. Curtis, squatting by the stretcher, grinned to himself.

“What was the actual position of the killer at the time of the blow or blows?” Alleyn continued. “As I read it, and you’ll correct me here, Curtis, Colonel Cartarette was squatting on his heels facing the stream with the cut grass in his hands. The heel marks and subsequent position suggest that when he was struck on the left temple he keeled over, away from the blow, and fell in the position in which Nurse Kettle found him. Now, he was either belted from behind by a lefthander or rammed by a sort of crouching charge from his left side or struck from the front by a swinging right-handed swipe… Yes, Oliphant?”

Sergeant Oliphant said, “Well, pardon me, sir, I was only going to remark, would it be, for example, something like the sort of blow a quarryman gives a wedge that is sticking out from a rock-face at the level of his knee?”

“Ah!” said P. C. Gripper appreciatively. “Or an underhand serve, like tennis.”

“That kind of thing,” Alleyn said, exchanging a look with Fox. “Now there wasn’t enough room between the Colonel and the brink for such a blow to be delivered; which is why I suggested his assailant would have had to be three feet out on the surface of the stream. Now, take a look up-stream towards the bridge, Br’er Fox. Go roundabout, because we’ll still keep the immediate vicinity unmucked up, and then come out here.”

Fox joined Alleyn on the lower bank of the little bay at the point where it jutted farthest out into the stream. They looked up the Chyne past the willow grove, which hid the near end of the bridge, to the far end, which was just visible about forty feet away with the old punt moored in the hole beneath it.

Alleyn said, “Charming, isn’t it? Like a lead-pencil vignette in a Victorian album. I wonder if Lady Lacklander ever sketches from this point. Have you read The Rape of Lucrèce, Br’er Fox?”

“I can’t say I have, unless it’s on the police list, which it sounds as if it might be. Or would it be Shakespeare?”

“The latter. There’s a bit about the eccentricities of river currents. The poem really refers to the Avon at Clopton Bridge, but it might have been written about the Chyne at this very point. Something about the stream that, coming through an arch, “yet in the eddy boundeth in his pride back to the strait that forced him on.” Look at that twig sailing towards us now. It’s got into just such a current, do you see, and instead of passing down the main stream is coming into this bay. Here it comes. Round it swirls in the eddy and back it goes towards the bridge. It’s a strong and quite considerable sort of counter-current. Stay where you are, Fox, for a moment, will you. Get down on your sinful old hunkers and bow your head over an imaginary fish. Imitate the action of the angler. Don’t look up and don’t move till I tell you.”

“Ah, what’s all this, I do wonder,” Mr. Fox speculated and squatted calmly at the water’s edge with his great hands between his feet.

Alleyn skirted round the crucial area and disappeared into the willow grove.

“What’s he up to?” Curtis asked of no one in particular and added a rude professional joke about Mr. Fox’s posture. Sergeant Oliphant and P. C. Gripper exchanged scandalized glances. Bailey and Thompson grinned. They all heard Alleyn walk briskly across Bottom Bridge, though only Fox, who faithfully kept his gaze on the ground, was in a position to see him. The others waited, expecting him for some reason of his own to appear on the opposite bank.

It was quite a shock to Dr. Curtis, Bailey, Thompson, Oliphant and Gripper when round the up-stream point of the willow-grove bay the old punt came sliding with Alleyn standing in it, a wilted daisy head in his hand.

The punt was carried transversely by the current away from the far bank and across the main stream into the little willow-grove harbour. It glided silently to rest, its square prow fitting neatly into the scar Alleyn had pointed out in the down-stream bank. At the same time its bottom grated on the gravel spit and it became motionless.

“I suppose,” Alleyn said, “you heard that, didn’t you?”

Fox looked up.

“I heard it,” he said. “But I saw and heard nothing until then.”

“Cartarette must have heard it too,” Alleyn said. “Which accounts, I fancy, for the daisies. Br’er Fox, do we think we know whodunit?”

Fox said, “If I take your meaning, Mr. Alleyn, I think you think you do.”