Scales of Justice

CHAPTER VII Watt’s Hill

“Things to be borne in mind,” Alleyn said, still speaking from the punt. “Point one: I found the daisy head in the prow. That is to say, on the same line with the other two heads but a bit further from the point of impact. Point two: this old crock has got a spare mooring line about thirty feet long. It’s still made fast at the other end and I’ve only got to haul myself back. I imagine the arrangement is for the convenience of Lady Lacklander, who, judging by splashes of old water-colour and a squashed tube, occasionally paints from the punt. It’s a sobering thought. I should like to see her, resembling one of the more obese female deities, seated in the prow of the punt, hauling herself back to harbourage. There is also, by the way, a pale-yellow giant hairpin in close association with two or three cigarette butts, some with lipstick and some not. Been there for some considerable time, I should say, so that’s another story.”

“Sir G.,” Fox ruminated, “and the girl-friend?”

“Trust you,” Alleyn said, “for clamping down on the sex-story. To return. Point three: remember that the punt-journey would be hidden from the dwellers on Watt’s Hill. Only this end of the bridge and the small area between it and the willow grove is visible to them. You can take him away now, Gripper.” Dr. Curtis covered the body with the groundsheet. P. C. Gripper and the constable-driver of the Yard car, assisted by Bailey and Thompson, carried Colonel Cartarette out of the willow grove and along the banks of his private fishing to Watt’s Lane, where the Swevenings hospital van awaited him.

“He was a very pleasant gentleman,” said Sergeant Oliphant. “I hope we get this chap, sir.”

“Oh, we’ll get him,” Fox remarked and looked composedly at his principal.

“I suggest,” Alleyn said, “that the killer saw Cartarette from the other bank, squatting over his catch. I suggest that the killer, familiar with the punt, slipped into it, let go the painter and was carried by what I’d like to call Shakespeare’s current across the stream and into this bay, where the punt grounded and left the scar of its prow in the bank there. I suggest that this person was well enough acquainted with the Colonel for him merely to look up when he heard the punt grate on the gravel and not rise. You can see the punt’s quite firmly grounded. Now if I stand about here, rather aft of amidships, I’m opposite the place where Cartarette squatted over his task and within striking distance of him if the blow was of the kind I think it was.”

“If,” said Fox.

“Yes, I know, ‘if.’ If you know of a better damn’ theory, you can damn’ well go to it,” Alleyn said cheerfully.

“O.K.,” Fox said. “I don’t, sir. So far.”

“What may at first look tiresome,” Alleyn went on, “is the position of the three decapitated daisy stalks and their heads. It’s true that one swipe of a suitable instrument might have beheaded all three and landed one daisy on the Colonel, a second on the bank and a third in the punt. Fair enough. But the same swipe couldn’t have reached the Colonel himself.”

Oliphant stared pointedly at the pole lying in the punt.

“No, Oliphant,” Alleyn said. “You try standing in this punt, whirling that thing round your head, swishing it through the daisies and catching a squatting man neatly on the temple with the end. What do you think our killer is… a caber-tosser from Braemar?”

“Do you reckon then,” Fox said, “that the daisies were beheaded by a second blow or earlier in the day? Or something?”

Sergeant Oliphant suddenly remarked, “Pardon me, but did the daisies necessairily have anything to do with the crime?”

“I think there’s probably a connection,” Alleyn rejoined, giving the sergeant his full attention. “The three heads are fresh enough to suggest it. One was in the Colonel’s coat and one was in the punt.”

“Well, pardon me, sir.” the emboldened sergeant continued with a slight modulation of his theme, “but did the punt necessarily have any bearing on the crime?”

“Unless we find a left-handed suspect, I think we must accept the punt as a working hypothesis. Have a look at the area between the punt and the place where the body lay and the patch of stones between the tuft from which the grass was cut and the place where the fish lay. It would be possible to step from the punt onto that patch of stones, and you would then be standing close to the position of Colonel Cartarette’s head. You would leave little or no trace of your presence. Now, on the willow-grove side of the body the ground is soft and earthy. The Colonel himself, Nurse Kettle and Dr. Lacklander have all left recognizable prints there. But there are no traces of a fourth visitor. Accept for the moment the theory that, after the Colonel had been knocked out, our assailant did step ashore onto the stony patch to deliver the final injury, or perhaps merely to make sure the victim was already dead. How would such a theory fit in with the missing trout, the punt and the daisies?”

Alleyn looked from Oliphant to Fox. The former had assumed that air of portentousness that so often waits upon utter bewilderment. The latter merely looked mildly astonished. This expression indicated that Mr. Fox had caught on.

Alleyn elaborated his theory of the trout, the punt and the daisies, building up a complete and detailed picture of one way in which Colonel Cartarette might have been murdered. “I realize,” he said, “that it’s all as full of ‘ifs’ as a passport to paradise. Produce any other theory that fits the facts and I’ll embrace it with fervour.”

Fox said dubiously, “Funny business if it works out that way. About the punt, now…”

“About the punt, yes. There are several pieces of cut grass in the bottom of the punt, and they smell of fish.”

“Do they, now?” said Fox appreciatively and added, “So what we’re meant to believe in is a murderer who sails up to his victim in a punt and lays him out. Not satisfied in his own mind that the man’s dead, he steps ashore and has another go with another instrument. Then for reasons you’ve made out to sound O.K., Mr. Alleyn, though there’s not much solid evidence, he swaps the Colonel’s fish for the Old ’Un. To do this he has to tootle back in the punt and fetch it. And by way of a change at some time or another he swipes the heads off daisies. Where he gets his weapons and what he does with the first fish is a great big secret. Is that the story, Mr. Alleyn?”

“It is and I’m sticking to it. Moreover, I’m leaving orders, Oliphant, for a number one search for the missing fish. And meet me,” Alleyn said to Fox, “on the other bank. I’ve something to show you.”

He gathered up the long tow-rope, pulled himself easily into the counter-current and so back across forty feet of water to the boatshed. When Fox, having come round by the bridge, joined him there, he was shaking his head.

“Oliphant and his boy have been over the ground like a herd of rhinos,” he said. “Getting their planks last night. Pity. Still… have a look here, Fox.”

He led the way into a deep hollow on the left bank. Here the rain had not obliterated the characteristic scars left by Lady Lacklander’s sketching stool and easel. Alleyn pointed to them. “But the really interesting exhibit is up here on the hillock. Come and see.”

Fox followed him over grass that carried faint signs of having been trampled. In a moment they stood looking down at a scarcely perceptible hole in the turf. It still held water. The grass nearby showed traces of pressure.

“If you examine that hole closely,” Alleyn said, “you’ll see it’s surrounded by a circular indentation.”

“Yes,” Fox said after a long pause, “yes, by God, so it is. Same as the injury, by God.”

“It’s the mark of the second weapon,” Alleyn said. “It’s the mark of a shooting-stick, Br’er Fox.”

“Attractive house,” Alleyn said as they emerged from the Home Coppice into full view of Nunspardon, “attractive house, Fox, isn’t it?”

“Very fine residence,” Fox said. “Georgian, would it be?”

“It would. Built on the site of the former house, which was a nunnery. Hence Nunspardon. Presented (as usual, by Henry VIII) to the Lacklanders. We’ll have to go cautiously here, Br’er Fox, by gum, we shall. They’ll have just about finished their breakfast. I wonder if Lady Lacklander has it downstairs or in her room. She has it downstairs,” he added as Lady Lacklander herself came out of the house with half a dozen dogs at her heels.

“She’s wearing men’s boots!” Fox observed.

“That may be because of her ulcerated toe.”

“Ah, to be sure. Lord love us!” Fox ejaculated. “She’s got a shooting-stick on her arm.”

“So she has. It may not be the one. And then again,” Alleyn muttered as he removed his hat and gaily lifted it on high to the distant figure, “it may.”

“Here she comes. No, she doesn’t.”

“Hell’s boots, she’s going to sit on it.”

Lady Lacklander had in fact begun to tramp towards them but had evidently changed her mind. She answered Alleyn’s salute by waving a heavy gardening glove at him. Then she halted, opened her shooting-stick and, with alarming empiricism, let herself down on it.

“With her weight,” Alleyn said crossly, “she’ll bloody well bury it. Come on.”

As soon as they were within hailing distance, Lady Lacklander shouted, “Good morning to you.” She then remained perfectly still and stared at them as they approached. Alleyn thought, “Old basilisk! She’s being deliberately embarrassing, damn her,” and he returned the stare with inoffensive interest, smiling vaguely.

“Have you been up all night?” she asked when they were at an appropriate distance. “Not that you look like it, I must say.”

Alleyn said, “We’re sorry to begin plaguing you so early but we’re in a bit of a jam.”

“Baffled?”

“Jolly nearly. Do you mind,” Alleyn went on with what his wife would have called sheer rude charm, “do you mind having your brains picked at nine o’clock in the morning?”

“What do you want with other people’s brains, I should like to know,” she said. Her eyes, screwed in between swags of flesh, glittered at him.

Alleyn embarked on a careful tarradiddle. “We begin to wonder,” he said, “if Cartarette’s murderer may have been lying doggo in the vicinity for some time before the assault.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t see him.”

“I mean really doggo. And as far as we know, which is not as far as we’d like, there’s no telling exactly where the hiding place could have been. We think it might have been somewhere that commanded at any rate a partial view of the bridge and the willow grove. We also think that it may have overlooked your sketching hollow.”

“You’ve discovered where that is, have you?”

“Simplicity itself, I promise you. You used an easel and a sketching stool.”

“And with my weight to sustain,” she said rocking, to his dismay, backwards and forwards on the shooting-stick, “the latter no doubt left its mark.”

“The thing is,” Alleyn said, “we think this person in hiding may have waited until he saw you go before coming out of cover. Did you stay down in your hollow all the time?”

“No, I had a look at my sketch several times from a distance. Anaemic beast it turned out, in the end.”

“Where exactly did you stand when you looked at it?”

“On the rise between the hollow and the bridge. You can’t have gone over your ground properly or you’d have found that out for yourself.”

“Should I? Why?” Alleyn asked and mentally touched wood.

“Because, my good Roderick, I used this shooting-stick and drove it so far into the ground that I was able to walk away and leave it, which I did repeatedly.”

“Did you leave it there when you went home?”

“Certainly. As a landmark for the boy when he came to collect my things. I dumped them beside it.”

“Lady Lacklander,” Alleyn said, “I want to reconstruct the crucial bit of the landscape as it was after you left it. Will you lend us your shooting-stick and your sketching gear for an hour or so? We’ll take the greatest care of them.”

“I don’t know what you’re up to,” she said, “and I suppose I may as well make up my mind that I won’t find out. Here you are.”

She heaved herself up and, sure enough, the disk and spike of her shooting-stick had been rammed down so hard into the path that both were embedded and the shooting-stick stood up of its own accord.

Alleyn desired above all things to release it with the most delicate care, perhaps dig it up, turf and all, and let the soil dry and fall away. But there was no chance of that; Lady Lacklander turned and with a single powerful wrench tore the shooting-stick from its bondage.

“There you are,” she said indifferently and gave it to him. “The sketching gear is up at the house. Come and get it?”

Alleyn thanked her and said that they would. He carried the shooting-stick by its middle and they all three went up to the house. George Lacklander was in the hall. His manner had changed overnight and he now spoke with the muted solemnity with which men of his type approach a sickroom or a church service. He made a further reference to his activities as a Justice of the Peace but otherwise was huffily reserved.

“Well, George,” his mother said, and bestowed a peculiar smirk upon him, “I don’t suppose they’ll let me out on bail, but no doubt you’ll be allowed to visit me.”

“Really, Mama!”

“Roderick is demanding my sketching gear on what appears to me to be a sadly trumped-up excuse. He has not yet, however, administered what I understand to the the Usual Warning.”

“Really, Mama!” George repeated with a miserable titter.

“Come along, Rory,” Lady Lacklander continued and led Alleyn out of the hall into a cloakroom where umbrellas, an assortment of galoshes, boots and shoes, and a variety of rackets and clubs were assembled. “I keep them here to be handy,” she said, “for garden peeps. I’m better at herbaceous borders than anything else, which just about places my prowess as a water-colourist, as, no doubt, your wife would tell you.”

“She’s not an aesthetic snob,” Alleyn said mildly.

“She’s a damn’ good painter, however,” Lady Lacklander continued. “There you are. Help yourself.”

He lifted a canvas haversack to which were strapped an easel and an artist’s umbrella. “Did you use the umbrella?” he asked.

“William, the boy, put it up. I didn’t want it; the sun was gone from the valley. I left it, standing but shut, when I came home.”

“We’ll see if it showed above the hollow.”

“Roderick,” said Lady Lacklander, suddenly, “what exactly were the injuries?”

“Hasn’t your grandson told you?”

“If he had I wouldn’t ask you.”

“They were cranial.”

“You needn’t be in a hurry to return the things. I’m not in the mood.”

“It’s very kind of you to lend them.”

“Kettle will tell me,” said Lady Lacklander, “all about it!”

“Of course she will,” he agreed cheerfully, “much better than I can.”

“What persuaded you to leave the Service for this unlovely trade?”

“It’s a long time ago,” Alleyn said, “but I seem to remember that it had something to do with a liking for facts.”

“Which should never be confused with the truth.”

“I still think they are the raw material of the truth. I mustn’t keep you any longer. Thank you so much for helping us,” Alleyn said and stood aside to let her pass.

He and Fox were aware of her great bulk, motionless on the steps, as they made their way back to the Home Coppice. Alleyn carried the shooting-stick by its middle and Fox the sketching gear. “And I don’t mind betting,” Alleyn said, “that from the rear we look as self-conscious as a brace of snowballs in hell.”

When they were out of sight in the trees, they examined their booty.

Alleyn laid the shooting-stick on a bank and squatted beside it.

“The disk,” he said, “screws on above the ferrule leaving a two-inch spike. Soft earth all over it and forced up under the collar of the disk, which obviously hasn’t been disengaged for weeks! All to the good. If it’s the weapon, it may have been washed in the Chyne and wiped, and it has, of course, been subsequently rammed down in soft earth, but it hasn’t been taken apart. There’s a good chance of a blood trace under the collar. We must let Curtis have this at once. Now let’s have a look at her kit.”

“Which we didn’t really want, did we?”

“You never know. It’s a radial easel with spiked legs, and it’s a jointed gamp with a spiked foot. Lots of spikes available, b,ut the shooting-stick fits the picture best. Now for the interior. Here we are,” Alleyn said, unbuckling the straps and peering inside. “Large water-colour box. Several mounted boards of not-surface paper. Case of brushes. Pencils. Bunjy. Water-jar. Sponge. Paint-rag. Paint-rag,” he repeated softly and bent over the kit sniffing. He drew a length of stained cotton rag out of the kit. It was blotched with patches of watery colour with one dark brownish-reddish stain that was broken by a number of folds as if the rag had been twisted about some object.

Alleyn looked up at his colleague.

“Smell, Fox,” he said.

Fox squatted behind him and sniffed stertorously.

“Fish,” he said.

Before returning, they visited the second tee and looked down on the valley from the Nunspardon side. They commanded a view of the far end of the bridge and the reaches of the Chyne above it. As from the other side of the valley, the willow grove, the lower reaches and the Nunspardon end of the bridge were hidden by intervening trees through which they could see part of the hollow where Lady Lacklander had worked at her sketch.

“So you see,” Alleyn pointed out, “it was from here that Mrs. Cartarette and that ass George Lacklander saw Mr. Phinn poaching under the bridge, and it was from down there in the hollow that Lady Lacklander glanced up and saw them.” He turned and looked back at a clump of trees on the golf course. “And I don’t mind betting,” he added, “that all this chat about teaching her to play golf is the cover-story for a pompous slap-and-tickle.”

“Do you reckon, Mr. Alleyn?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s Oliphant at the bridge,” Alleyn said, waving his hand. “We’ll get him to take this stuff straight to Curtis, who’ll be in Chyning by now. He’s starting his P.M. by eleven. Dr. Lacklander’s arranged for him to use the hospital mortuary. I want a report, as soon as we can get it, on the rag and the shooting-stick.”

“Will the young doctor attend the autopsy, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. I think our next move had better be a routine check-up on Commander Syce.”

“That’s the chap Miss Kettle mentioned, with lumbago, who lives in the middle house,” Fox observed. “I wonder would he have seen anything.”

“Depends on the position of his bed.”

“It’s a nasty thing, lumbago,” Fox mused.

They handed over Lady Lacklander’s property to Sergeant Oliphant with an explanatory note for Dr. Curtis and instructions to search the valley for the whole or part of the missing trout. They then climbed the river path to Uplands.

They passed through the Hammer Farm spinney and entered that of Commander Syce. Here they encountered a small notice nailed to a tree. It was freshly painted and bore in neatly executed letters the legend: “Beware of Archery.”

“Look at that!” Fox said. “And we’ve forgotten our green tights.”

“It may be a warning to Nurse Kettle,” Alleyn said.

“I don’t get you, sir?”

“Not to flirt with the Commander when she beats up his lumbago.”

“Very far-fetched,” Fox said stiffly.

As they emerged from Commander Syce’s spinney into his garden, they heard a twang followed by a peculiar whining sound and the “tuck” of a penetrating blow.

“What the hell’s that!” Fox ejaculated. “It sounded like the flight of an arrow.”

“Which is not surprising,” Alleyn rejoined, “as that is what it was.”

He nodded at a tree not far from where they stood and there, astonishing and incongruous, was embedded an arrow prettily flighted in red and implanted in the centre of a neatly and freshly carved heart. It still quivered very slightly. “We can’t say we weren’t warned,” Alleyn pointed out.

“Very careless!” Fox said crossly.

Alleyn pulled out the arrow and looked closely at it. “Deadly if they hit the right spot. I hope you’ve noticed the heart. It would appear that Commander Syce has recovered from his lumbago and fallen into love’s sickness. Come on.”

They emerged from the spinney to discover Commander Syce himself some fifty yards away, bow in hand, quiver at thigh, scarlet-faced and irresolute.

“Look here!” he shouted. “Damn’ sorry and all that, but, great grief, how was I to know, and, damn it all, what about the notice!”

“Yes, yes,” Alleyn rejoined. “We’re here at our own risk.”

He and Fox approached Syce, who, unlike Lady Lacklander, evidently found the interval between the first hail and, as it were, boarding distance extremely embarrassing. As they plodded up the hill, he looked anywhere but at them and when, finally, Alleyn introduced himself and Fox, he shied away from them like an unbroken colt.

“We are,” Alleyn explained, “police officers.”

“Good Lord!”

“I suppose you’ve heard of last night’s tragedy?”

“What tragedy?”

“Colonel Cartarette.”

“Cartarette?”

“He has been murdered.”

“Great grief!”

“We’re calling on his neighbours in case…”

“What time?”

“About nine o’clock, we think.”

“How d’you know it’s murder?”

“By the nature of the injuries, which are particularly savage ones, to the head.”

“Who found him?”

“The District Nurse. Nurse Kettle.”

Commander Syce turned scarlet. “Why didn’t she get me?” he said.

“Would you expect her to?”

“No.”

“Well then…”

“I say, come in, won’t you? No good nattering out here, what!” shouted Commander Syce.

They followed him into his desolate drawing-room and noted the improvised bed, now tidily made-up, and a table set out with an orderly array of drawing materials and water-colours. A large picture-map in the early stages of composition was pinned to a drawing board. Alleyn saw that its subject was Swevenings and that a number of lively figures had already been sketched in.

“That’s very pleasant,” Alleyn said, looking at it.

Commander Syce made a complicated and terrified noise and interposed himself between the picture-map and their gaze. He muttered something about doing it for a friend.

“Isn’t she lucky?” Alleyn remarked lightly. Commander Syce turned, if anything, deeper scarlet, and Inspector Fox looked depressed.

Alleyn said he was sure Commander Syce would understand that as a matter of routine the police were calling upon Cartarette’s neighbours. “Simply,” he said, “to try and get a background. When one is casting about in a case like this…”

“Haven’t you got the fellah?”

“No. But we hope that by talking to those of the Colonel’s neighbours who were anywhere near…”

“I wasn’t. Nowhere near.”

Alleyn said with a scarcely perceptible modulation of tone, “Then you know where he was found?”

“ ’Course I do. You say nine o’clock. Miss… ah… the… ah… the lady who you tell me found him left here at five to nine and I saw her go down into the valley. If she found him at nine, he must have been in the perishing valley, mustn’t he? I watched her go down.”

“From where?”

“From up here. The window. She told me she was going down the valley.”

“You were on your feet, then? Not completely prostrate with lumbago?”

Commander Syce began to look wretchedly uncomfortable. “I struggled up, don’t you know,” he said.

“And this morning you’ve quite recovered?”

“It comes and goes.”

“Very tricky,” said Alleyn. He still had the arrow in his hand and now held it up. “Do you often loose these things off into your spinney?” he asked.

Commander Syce muttered something about a change from target shooting.

“I’ve often thought I’d like to have a shot at archery,” Alleyn lied amiably. “One of the more blameless sports. Tell me, what weight of bow do you use?”

“A sixty-pound pull.”

“Really! What’s the longest… is clout the word?… that can be shot with a sixty-pounder?”

“Two hundred and forty yards.”

“Is that twelve score? ‘A’ would have clapped i’ the clout at twelve score’?”

“That’s right,” Commander Syce agreed and shot what might have been an appreciative glance at Alleyn.

“Quite a length. However, I mustn’t keep you gossiping about archery. What I really want to ask you is this. I understand that you’ve known Colonel Cartarette a great many years?”

“Off and on. Neighbours. Damn’ nice fellah.”

“Exactly. And I believe that when Cartarette was in the Far East, you ran up against him… at Hong Kong, was it?” Alleyn improvised hopefully.

“Singapore.”

“Oh, yes. The reason why I’m asking you is this. From the character of the crime and the apparently complete absence of motive, here, we are wondering if it can possibly be a back-kick from his work out in the East.”

“Wouldn’t know.”

“Look here, can you tell us anything at all about his life in the East? I mean, anything that might start us off. When actually did you see him out there?”

“Last time would be four years ago. I was still on the active list. My ship was based on Singapore and he looked me up when we were in port. I was axed six months later.”

“Did you see much of them put there?

“Them?”

“The Cartarettes.”

Commander Syce glared at Alleyn. “He wasn’t married,” he said, “then.”

“So you didn’t meet the second Mrs. Cartarette until you came back here, I suppose?”

Commander Syce thrust his hands into his pockets and walked over to they window. “I had met her, yes,” he mumbled. “Out there.”

“Before they married?”

“Yes.”

“Did you bring them together?” Alleyn asked lightly and he saw the muscles in the back of Syce’s neck stiffen under the reddened skin.

“I introduced them, as it happens,” Syce said loudly without turning his head.

“That’s always rather amusing. Or I find it so, being,” Alleyn said looking fixedly at Fox, “an incorrigible match-maker.”

“Good God, nothing like that!” Syce shouted. “Last thing I intended. Good God, no!”

He spoke with extraordinary vehemence and seemed to be moved equally by astonishment, shame and indignation. Alleyn wondered why on earth he himself didn’t get the snub he had certainly invited and decided it was because Syce was too embarrassed to administer one. He tried to get something more about Syce’s encounters with Cartarette in Singapore but was unsuccessful. He noticed the unsteady hands, moist skin and patchy colour, and the bewildered, unhappy look in the very blue eyes. “Alcoholic, poor devil,” he thought.

“It’s no good asking me anything,” Syce abruptly announced. “Nobody tells me anything. I don’t go anywhere. I’m no good to anybody.”

“We’re only looking for a background, and I hoped you might be able to provide a piece of it. Miss Kettle was saying last night how close the Swevenings people are to each other; it all sounded quite feudal. Even Sir Harold Lacklander had young Phinn as his secretary. What did you say?”

“Nothing. Young perisher. Doesn’t matter.”

“…and as soon as your ship comes in, Cartarette naturally looks you up. You bring about his first meeting with Miss… I don’t know Mrs. Cartarette’s maiden name.”

Commander Syce mumbled unhappily.

“Perhaps you can give it to me,” Alleyn said apologetically. “We have to get these details for the files. Save me bothering her.”

He gazed mildly at Syce, who threw one agonized glance at him, swallowed with difficulty, and said in a strangulated voice, “De Vere.”

There was a marked silence. Fox cleared his throat.

“Ah, yes,” Alleyn said.

“Would you have thought,” Fox asked as he and Alleyn made their way through Mr. Phinn’s coppice to Jacob’s Cottage, “that the present Mrs. Cartarette was born into the purple, Mr. Alleyn?”

“I wouldn’t have said so, Br’er Fox. No.”

“De Vere, though?”

“My foot.”

“Perhaps,” Fox speculated, reverting to the language in which he so ardently desired to become proficient, “perhaps she’s… er… déclassée.”

“I think, on the contrary, she’s on her way up.”

“Ah. The baronet, now,” Fox went on; “he’s sweet on her, as anyone could see. Would you think it was a strong enough attraction to incite either of them to violence?”

“I should think he was going through the silly season most men of his type experience. I must say I can’t see him raising an amatory passion to the power of homicide in any woman. You never know, of course; I should think she must find life in Swevenings pretty dim. What did you collect from Syce’s general behaviour, Fox?”

“Well, now, he did get me wondering what exactly are his feelings about this lady? I mean, they seem to be old acquaintances, don’t they? Miss Kettle said he made a picture of Mrs. Cartarette before she was married. And then he didn’t seem to have fancied the marriage much, did he? Practically smoked when it was mentioned, he got so hot. My idea is there was something between him and her and the magnolia bush wherever East meets West.”

“You dirty old man,” Alleyn said absently. “We’ll have to find out, you know.”

“Crime passionnel?”

“Again you never know. We’ll ring the Yard and ask them to look him up in the Navy List. They can find out when he was in Singapore and get a confidential report.”

“Say,” Fox speculated, “that he was sweet on her. Say they were engaged when he introduced her to the Colonel. Say he went off in his ship and then was retired from the navy and came home and found Kitty de Vere changed into the second Mrs. Cartarette. So he takes to the bottle and gets,” said Mr. Fox, “an idé fixe.”

“So will you, if you go on speculating with such insatiable virtuosity. And what about his lumbago? Personally, I think he’s having a dim fling with Nurse Kettle.”

Fox looked put out.

“Very unsuitable,” he said.

“Here is Mr. Phinn’s spinney and here, I think, is our girlfriend of last night.”

Mrs. Thomasina Twitchett was, in fact, taking a stroll. When she saw them, she wafted her tail, blinked and sat down.

“Good morning, my dear,” said Alleyn.

He sat on his heels and extended his hand. Mrs. Twitchett did not advance upon it, but she broke into an extremely loud purring.

“You know,” Alleyn continued severely, “if you could do a little better than purrs and mews, I rather fancy you could give us exactly the information we need. You were in the bottom meadow last night, my dear, and I’ll be bound you were all eyes and ears.”

Mrs. Twitchett half closed her eyes, sniffed at his extended forefinger and began to lick it.

“Thinks you’re a kitten,” Fox said sardonically.

Alleyn in his turn sniffed at his finger and then lowered his face almost to the level of the cat’s. She saluted him with a brief dab of her nose.

“What a girl,” Fox said.

“She no longer smells of raw fish. Milk and a little cooked rabbit, I fancy. Do you remember where we met her last night?”

“Soon after we began to climb the hill on this side, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. We’ll have a look over the terrain when we get the chance. Come on.”

They climbed up through Mr. Phinn’s spinney and finally emerged on the lawn before Jacob’s Cottage. “Though if that’s a cottage,” Fox observed, “Buck House is a bungalow.”

“Case of inverted snobbism, I daresay. It’s a nice front, nevertheless. Might have been the dower house to Nunspardon at one time. Rum go, couple of unattached males living side-by-side in houses that are much too big for them.”

“I wonder how Mr. Phinn and the Commander hit it off.”

“I wouldn’t mind having a bet that they don’t. Look, here he comes.”

“Cripes!” Mr. Fox ejaculated. “What a menagerie!”

Mr. Phinn had, in fact, come out of his house accompanied by an escort of cats and Mrs. Twitchett’s three fat kittens.

“No more!” he was saying in his curious alto voice. “All gone! Go and catch micey, you lazy lot of furs.”

He set down the empty dish he had been carrying. Some object fell from his breast pocket and he replaced it in a hurry. Some of his cats pretended alarm and flounced off, the others merely stared at him. The three kittens, seeing their mother, galloped unsteadily towards her with stiff tails and a great deal of conversation. Mr. Phinn saw Alleyn and Fox. Staring at them, he clapped his hands like a mechanical toy that had not quite run down.

The tassel of his smoking cap had swung over his nose, but his sudden pallor undid its comic effect. The handle of the concealed object protruded from his breast pocket. He began to walk towards them, and his feline escort, with the exception of the Twitchetts, scattered before him.

“Good morning,” Mr. Phinn fluted thickly. He swept aside his tassel with a not quite steady hand and pulled up a dingy handkerchief, thus concealing the protruding handle. “To what beneficent constabular breeze do I owe this enchanting surprise? Detectives, emerging from a grove of trees!” he exclaimed and clasped his hands. “Like fauns in pursuit of some elusive hamadryad! Armed, I perceive,” he added with a malevolent glance at Commander Syce’s arrow, which Alleyn had retained by the simple expedient of absent-mindedly walking away with it.

“Good morning, Mr. Phinn,” Alleyn said. “I have been renewing my acquaintance with your charming cat.”

“Isn’t she sweet?” Mr. Phinn moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Such a devoted mama, you can’t think!”

Alleyn sat on his heels beside Mrs. Twitchett, who gently kicked away one of her too-greedy kittens. “Her fur’s in wonderful condition for a nursing mother,” he said, stroking it. “Do you give her anything special to eat?”

Mr. Phinn began to talk with the sickening extravagance of the feline-fanatic. “A balanced diet,” he explained in a high-pitched voice, “of her own choosing. Fissy on Mondays and Fridays. Steaky on Tuesdays. Livvy on Wednesdays. Cooked bun on Thursdays and Sundays. Embellished,” he added with a merciless smile, “by our own clever claws, with micey and birdie.”

“Fish only twice a week,” Alleyn mused, and Fox, suddenly feeling that something was expected of him, said, “Fancy!”

“She is looking forward to to-morrow,” Mr. Phinn said, “with the devoted acquiescence of a good Catholic, although, of course, theistically, she professes the mysteries of Old Nile.”

“You don’t occasionally catch her dinner for her in the Chyne?”

“When I am successful,” Mr. Phinn said, “we share.”

“Did you,” Alleyn asked, fatuously addressing himself to the cat, “did you have fresh fissy for your supper last night, my angel?” Mrs. Twitchett turned contemptuously to her kittens.

“No!” said Mr. Phinn in his natural voice.

“You made no other catch then, besides the fabulous Old ’Un?”

“No!”

“May we talk?”

Mr. Phinn, silent for once, led the way through a side door and down a passage into a sizable library.

Alleyn’s eye for other people’s houses unobtrusively explored the room. The Colonel’s study had been pleasant, civilized and not lacking in feminine graces. Commander Syce’s drawing-room was at once clean, orderly, desolate and entirely masculine. Mr. Phinn’s library was disorderly, dirty, neglected and ambiguous. It exhibited confused traces of Georgian grace, Victorian pomposity and Edwardian muddle. Cushions that had once been fashionably elaborate were now stained and tarnished. There were yards of dead canvas that had once been acceptable to Burlington House, including the portrait of a fragile-looking lady with a contradictory jaw that was vaguely familiar. There were rows and rows of “gift” books about cats, cheek-by-jowl with Edwardian novels which, if opened, would be found to contain illustrations of young women in dust coats and motoring veils making haughty little moues at gladiators in Norfolk jackets. But there were also one or two admirable chairs, an unmistakable Lyly and a lovely, though filthy, rug. And among the decrepit novels were books of distinction and authority. It was on Mr. Phinn’s shelves that Alleyn noticed an unexpected link with the Colonel. For here among a collection of books on angling he saw again The Scaly Breed by Maurice Cartarette. But what interested Alleyn perhaps more than all these items was a state of chaos that was to be observed on and near a very nice serpentine-fronted bureau. The choked drawers were half out, one indeed was on the floor, the top was covered with miscellaneous objects which, to a police-trained eye, had clearly been dragged out in handfuls, while the carpet nearby was littered with a further assortment. A burglar, taken by surprise, could not have left clearer evidence behind him.

“How can I serve you?” asked Mr. Phinn. “A little refreshment, by the way? A glass of sherry? Does Tio Pepe recommend himself to your notice?”

“Not quite so early in the morning, thank you, and I’m afraid this is a duty call.”

“Indeed? How I wish I could be of some help. I have spent a perfectly wretched night — such of it as remained to me — fretting and speculating, you know. A murderer in the Vale! Really, if it wasn’t so dreadful, there would be a kind of grotesque humour in the thought. We are so very respectable in Swevenings. Not a ripple, one would have thought, on the surface of the Chyne!”

He flinched and made the sort of grimace that is induced by a sudden twinge of toothache.

“Would one not? What,” Alleyn asked, “about the Battle of the Old ’Un?”

Mr. Phinn was ready for him. He fluttered his fingers. “Nil nisi,” he said, with rather breathless airiness, “and all the rest of it, but really the Colonel was most exasperating as an angler. A monument of integrity in every other respect, I daresay, but as a fly-fisherman I am sorry to say there were some hideous lapses. It is an ethical paradox that so noble a sport should occasionally be wedded to such lamentable malpractices.”

“Such,” Alleyn suggested, “as casting under a bridge into your neighbour’s preserves?”

“I will defend my action before the Judgment Seat, and the ghost of the sublime Walton himself will thunder in my defence. It was entirely permissable.”

“Did you and the Colonel,” Alleyn said, “speak of anything else but this… ah… this ethical paradox?”

Mr. Phinn glared at him, opened his mouth, thought perhaps of Lady Lacklander and shut it again. Alleyn for his part remembered, with exasperation, the law on extra-judicial admissions. Lady Lacklander had told him there had been a further discussion between the two men but had refused to say what it was about. If Mr. Phinn should ever come to trial for the murder of Maurice Cartarette, or even if he should merely be called to give evidence against someone else, the use by Alleyn of the first of Lady Lacklander’s admissions and the concealment of the second would be held by a court of law to be improper. He decided to take a risk.

“We have been given to understand,” he said, “that there was, in fact, a further discussion.”

There was a long silence.

“Well, Mr. Phinn?”

“Well. I am waiting.”

“For what?”

“I believe it is known as the Usual Warning,” Mr. Phinn said.

“The police are only obliged to give the Usual Warning when they have decided to make an arrest.”

“And you have not yet arrived at this decision?”

“Not yet.”

“You, of course, have your information from the Lady Gargantua, the Mammoth Chatelaine, the Great, repeat Great, Lady of Nunspardon,” said Mr. Phinn, and then surprisingly turned pink. His gaze, oddly fixed, was directed past Alleyn’s elbow to some object behind him. It did not waver. “Not,” Mr. Phinn added, “that, in certain respects, her worth does not correspond by a rough computation with her avoirdupois. Did she divulge the nature of my further conversation with the Colonel?”

“No.”

“Then neither,” said Mr. Phinn, “shall I. At least, not yet. Not unless I am obliged to do so.”

The direction of his gaze had not shifted.

“Very well,” Alleyn said and turned away with an air of finality.

He had been standing with his back to a desk. Presiding over an incredibly heaped-up litter were two photographs in tarnished silver frames. One was of the lady of the portrait. The other was of a young man bearing a strong resemblance to her and was inscribed in a flowing hand: “Ludovic.”

It was at this photograph that Mr. Phinn had been staring.