Scales of Justice

CHAPTER VIII Jacob’s Cottage

Alleyn decided to press home what might or might not be an advantage and so did so with distaste. He had been in the police service for over twenty years. Under slow pressure his outward habit had toughened, but, like an ice cube that under warmth will yield its surface but retain its inward form, so his personality had kept its pattern intact. When an investigation led him, as this did, to take action that was distasteful to him, he imposed a discipline upon himself and went forward. It was a kind of abstinence, however, that prompted him to do so.

He said, looking at the photograph, “This is your son, sir, isn’t it?”

Mr. Phinn, in a voice that was quite unlike his usual emphatic alto, said, “My son, Ludovic.”

“I didn’t meet him, but I was in the Special Branch in 1937. I heard about his tragedy, of course.”

“He was a good boy,” Mr. Phinn said. “I think I may have spoiled him. I fear I may have done so.”

“One can’t tell about these things.”

“No. One can’t tell.”

“I don’t ask you to forgive me for speaking of him. In a case of homicide I’m afraid no holds are barred. We have discovered that Sir Harold Lacklander died with the name ‘Vic’ on his lips and full of concern about the publication of his own memoirs which he had entrusted to Colonel Cartarette. We know that your son was Sir Harold’s secretary during a crucial period of his administration in Zlomce and that Sir Harold could hardly avoid mention of the tragedy of your son’s death if he was to write anything like a definitive record of his own career.”

“You need go no further,” said Mr. Phinn with a wave of his hand. “I see very clearly what is in your mind.” He looked at Fox, whose notebook was in his palm. “Pray write openly, Inspector. Mr. Alleyn, you wonder, do you not, if I quarrelled with Colonel Cartarette because he proposed to make public, through Lacklander’s memoirs, the ruin of my boy. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“I wonder,” Alleyn said, “if the discussion, that Lady Lacklander overheard but doesn’t care to reveal, was about some such matter.”

Mr. Phinn suddenly beat his pudgy hands together, once. “If Lady L. does not care to tell you,” he announced, “then neither for the time being do I.”

“I wonder, too,” Alleyn continued, “if it wouldn’t be easy to misjudge completely your own motives and those of Lady Lacklander.”

“Ah,” Mr. Phinn said, with extraordinary complacency, “you are on dangerous ground indeed, my dear Alleyn. Peel away the layers of motive from the ethical onion and your eyes may well begin to water. It is no occupation, believe me, for a Chief Detective-Inspector.”

A faint smile played conceitedly about the corners of his mouth. Alleyn might have supposed him to have completely recovered his equanimity if it had not been for the slightest possible tic in the lower lid of his right eye and a movement of the fingers of one hand across the back of the other.

“I wonder,” Alleyn said, “if you’d mind showing us your fishing gear… the whole equipment as you took it down yesterday to the Chyne?”

“And why not?” Mr. Phinn rejoined. “But I demand,” he added loudly, “to know if you suspect me of this crime. Do you? Do you?”

“Come now,” Alleyn said, “you must know very well that you can’t in the same breath refuse to answer our questions and demand an answer to your own. If we may, we would like to see your fishing gear.”

Mr. Phinn stared at him. “It’s not here,” he said. “I’ll get it.”

“Fox will help you.”

Mr. Phinn looked as if he didn’t much relish this offer but appeared to think better of refusing it. He and Fox went out together. Alleyn moved over to the book-lined wall on his left and took down Maurice Cartarette’s work on The Scaly Breed. It was inscribed on the title page: “January 1930. For Viccy on his eighteenth birthday with good wishes for many happy castings,” and was signed by the author. The Colonel, Alleyn reflected, had evidently been on better terms with young Phinn than with his father.

He riffled through the pages. The book had been published in 1929 and appeared to be a series of short and pleasantly written essays on the behaviour and eccentricities of freshwater fish. It contained an odd mixture of folkishness, natural history, mild flights of fancy and, apparently, a certain amount of scientific fact. It was illustrated, rather charmingly, with marginal drawings. Alleyn turned back to the title page and found that they were by Geoffrey Syce: another instance, he thought, of the way the people of Swevenings stick together, and he wondered if, twenty-six years ago, the Colonel in his regiment and the Commander in his ship had written to each other about the scaly breed and about how they should fashion their book. His eye fell on a page-heading, “No Two Alike,” and with astonishment he saw what at first he took to be a familiar enough kind of diagram: that of two magnified fingerprints, showing the essential dissimilarities. At first glance they might have been lifted from a manual on criminal investigation. When, however, he looked more closely, he found, written underneath: “Microphotographs. Fig. 1. Scale of Brown Trout. 6 years. 2½ lbs. Chyne River. Showing 4 years’ poor growth followed by 2 years’ vigorous growth. Fig. 2. Scale of Trout. 4 years. 1 lb. Chyne River. Note differences in circuli, winter bands and spawning marks.” With sharpened interest he began to read the accompanying letterpress:

For the margin Commander Syce had made a facetious picture of a roach with meerschaum and deerstalker hat examining through a lens the scales of a very tough-looking trout.

Alleyn had time to re-read the page. He turned back to the frontispiece — a drawing of the Colonel himself. Alleyn found in the face a dual suggestion of soldier and diplomat superimposed, he fancied, on something that was pure countryman. “A nice chap, he looks. I wonder if it would have amused him to know that he himself has put into my hands the prize piece of information received.”

He replaced the book and turned to the desk with its indescribable litter of pamphlets, brochures, unopened and opened letters, newspapers and magazines. Having inspected the surface, he began, gingerly, to disturb the top layer and in a moment or two had disclosed a letter addressed to “Octavius Phinn, Esq.” in the beautiful and unmistakable handwriting of Colonel Cartarette.

Alleyn had just had time enough to discover that it contained about thirty pages of typescript marked on the outside: “7,” when he heard Fox’s voice on the stairs. He turned away and placed himself in front of the portrait.

Mr. Phinn and Fox reappeared with the fishing gear.

“I have,” Alleyn said, “been enjoying this very charming portrait.”

“My wife.”

“Am I imagining — perhaps I am — a likeness to Dr. Mark Lacklander?”

“There was,” Mr. Phinn said shortly, “a distant connection. Here are my toys,”

He was evidently one of those anglers who cannot resist the call of the illustrated catalogue and the lure of the gadget. His creel, his gaff, his net, his case of flies and his superb rod were supplemented by every conceivable toy, all of them, Alleyn expected, extremely expensive. His canvas bag was slotted and pocketted to receive these mysteries, and Alleyn drew them out one after another to discover that they were all freshly cleaned and in wonderful order.

“With what fly,” he asked Mr. Phinn, “did you hook the Old ’Un? It must have been a Homeric struggle, surely?”

“Grant me the bridge,” Mr. Phinn shouted excitedly, “grant me that, and I’ll tell you.”

“Very well,” Alleyn conceded with a grin, “we’ll take the bridge in our stride. I concede it. Let’s have the story.”

Mr. Phinn went strongly into action. It appeared that, at the mention of his prowess, the emotions that had so lately seemed to grip him were completely forgotten. Fear, if he had known fear, paternal anguish, if he had in fact experienced it, and anger, if it was indeed anger that had occasionally moved him, were all abandoned for the absolute passion of the angler. He led them out of doors, exhibited his retrospective prowess in casting, led them in again and re-enacted in the strangest pantomime his battle with the Old ’Un: how he was played, with breath-taking reverses, up through the waters under the bridge and into Mr. Phinn’s indisputable preserves; how he was nearly lost, and what cunning he displayed, and how Mr. Phinn countered with even greater cunning of his own. Finally there was the great capitulation, the landing and the coup de grâce, this last being administered, as Mr. Phinn made clear in spirited pantomime, with a sort of angler’s cosh: a short, heavily leaded rod.

Alleyn took this instrument in his hand and balanced it. “What do you call the thing?” he asked.

“A priest,” Mr. Phinn said. “It is called a priest. I don’t know why.”

“Perhaps because of its valedictory function.” He laid it on the desk and placed Commander Syce’s arrow beside it. Mr. Phinn stared but said nothing.

“I really must return his arrow to Commander Syce,” Alleyn said absently. “I found it in the spinney, embedded in a tree trunk.”

He might have touched off a high-explosive. The colour flooded angrily into Mr. Phinn’s face and he began to shout of the infamies of Commander Syce and his archery. The death of Thomasina Twitchett’s mother at the hands of Commander Syce was furiously recalled. Syce, Mr. Phinn said, was a monster, an alcoholic sadist, possessed of a blood-lust. It was with malice aforethought that he had transfixed the dowager Twitchett. The plea of accident was ridiculous: the thing was an obsession. Syce would drink himself into a sagittal fury and fire arrows off madly into the landscape. Only last night, Mr. Phinn continued, when he himself was returning from the Chyne after what he now called his little mésentente with Colonel Cartarette, the Commander’s bow was twanging away on the archery lawn and Mr. Phinn had actually heard the “tuck” of an arrow in a tree trunk dangerously near to himself. The time was a quarter past eight. He remembered hearing his clock chime at the same time.

“I think you must be mistaken,” Alleyn put in mildly. “Nurse Kettle tells us that last evening Commander Syce was completely incapacitated by an acute attack of lumbago.”

Mr. Phinn shouted out a rude and derisive word. “A farrago of nonsense!” he continued. “Either she is his accomplice or his paramour or possibly,” he amended more charitably, “his dupe. I swear he was devilishly active last night. I swear it. I trembled lest my Thomasina, who had accompanied me to the Chyne, should share the fate of her mama. She did not join me on my return but had preferred to linger in the evening air. Indeed, the reason for my perhaps slightly dramatic entry into Hammer in the early hours of this morning was my hope of retrieving my errant Fur. The dreadful news with which you met me quite put her out of my head,” Mr. Phinn concluded and did not look as if he expected to be believed.

“I see,” Alleyn said and did not look as if he believed him. “Quite a chapter of accidents. Do you mind if we take possession of your fishing gear for a short time? Part of a routine check, you know.”

Mr. Phinn was at a loss for words. “But how quite extraordinary!” he at last exclaimed. “My fishing gear? Well, I suppose one must not refuse.”

“We shan’t keep it any longer than is necessary,” Alleyn assured him.

Fox put the kit in order and slung it over his massive shoulder.

“And also, I’m afraid,” Alleyn said apologetically, “the shoes and suit that you wore on your fishing expedition.”

“My shoes? My suit! But why, why! I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.”

“It may be some comfort to you to know that I shall make the same awkward demands of at least four other persons.”

Mr. Phinn seemed to brighten a little. “Blood?” he asked.

“Not necessarily,” Alleyn said coolly. “This and that, you know, and the other thing. May we have them?”

“A fat lot of use,” Mr. Phinn muttered, “if I said no. And in any case you are perfectly welcome to every garment I possess. Homicidally speaking, they are as pure as the driven snow.”

When he saw them, Alleyn reflected that although, homicidally speaking, this might be true, from any other point of view it was grossly inaccurate: Mr. Phinn’s angling garments were exceedingly grubby and smelt quite strongly of fish. Alleyn saw with satisfaction a slimy deposit on the right leg of a pair of old-fashioned knickerbockers. The shoes were filthy and the stockings in holes. With a gesture of defiance, their owner flung on top of them a dilapidated tweed hat with the usual collection of flies in the band.

“Make what you like of them,” he said grandly, “and see that you let me have them back in the order in which you receive them.”

Alleyn gave him grave assurance to this effect and wrapped up the garments. Fox wrote out a receipt for the unlovely bundle.

“We won’t keep you any longer,” Alleyn said, “unless by any chance you would care to give us a true account of your ramblings in the watches of the night.”

Mr. Phinn gaped at him and in doing so resembled for the moment the Old ’Un himself.

“Because,” Alleyn went on, “you haven’t done so yet, you know. I mean, your story of seeing lighted windows and calling to tell the Colonel of your catch was completely blown-up by Lady Lacklander. And your latest version… that you were on the hunt for your mother-cat… really won’t do at all. Feline nursing mothers, and you tell us this is a particularly devoted one, do not desert their kittens for six hours on end. Moreover, we came upon Mrs. Twitchett last night on her way home about half past twelve. And why, if the Twitchett story was the true one, did you not produce it in the first instance?” Alleyn waited for some seconds. “You see,” he said, “you have no answer to any of these questions.”

“I shall not make any further statements. I prefer to remain silent.”

“Shall I tell you what I think may have happened last night? I think that when you made your first remark as you stood in the French window at Hammer, you said something that was near the truth. I think that either then, or perhaps earlier in the evening, you had sallied out in search of your great trout. I think you regretted having flung it down on the bridge during your quarrel with Colonel Cartarette. You knew he wouldn’t touch it, because he had told you so and had gone off, leaving it there. Did you not go down into the valley of the Chyne to retrieve the trout, and did you not find it gone from the bridge when you got there?”

The colour mounted in Mr. Phinn’s face in uneven patches. He lowered his chin and looked quickly at Alleyn from under his meagre brows. But he said nothing.

“If this is so,” Alleyn went on, “and I am encouraged by your silence to hope that it may be, I can’t help wondering what you did next. Did you come straight back to Hammer and seeing the lighted windows make up your mind to accuse the Colonel of having pinched your fish after all? But no. If that had been so, your behaviour would have been different. You would not, before you were aware of his death, have trembled and gone white to the lips. Nor would you have invented your cock-and-bull story of wanting to tell the Colonel all about your catch: a story that was at once disproved when Lady Lacklander told us about your row with the Colonel over that very catch and by the fact that for a long time you have not been on visiting terms with your neighbour.”

Mr. Phinn had turned aside, and Alleyn walked round him until they were again face-to-face.

“How,” he said, “is one to explain your behaviour of last night? Shall I tell you what I think? I think that when you arrived at Hammer Farm at five past one this morning, you knew already that Colonel Cartarette was dead.”

Still Mr. Phinn said nothing.

“Now if this is true,” Alleyn said, “and again you don’t deny it, you have misinformed us about your movements. You let us understand that you returned to the bottom meadow just before you came to Hammer Farm at about one o’clock. But your coat was as dry as a chip. So it must have been much earlier in the evening before the rain that you returned to the bridge in the hope of retrieving the fish and found it gone. And knowing that the Colonel was fishing his own waters not far away, would you not seek him out? Now, if you did behave as I have suggested, you did so at a time when nobody saw you. That must have been after Lady Lacklander, Mrs. Cartarette and Dr. Lacklander had all gone home. Mrs. Cartarette reached Hammer Farm at about five past eight, and Dr. Lacklander went home at a quarter past eight. Neither of them saw the trout. On my working hypothesis, then, you revisited the valley after a quarter past eight and, one would suppose, before a quarter to nine when Nurse Kettle did so. And there, Mr. Phinn, in the willow grove you found Colonel Cartarette’s dead body with your mammoth trout beside it. And didn’t Nurse Kettle very nearly catch you in the willow grove?”

Mr. Phinn ejaculated, “Has she said—” and caught his voice back.

“No,” Alleyn said. “Not specifically. It is I who suggest that you hid and watched her and crept away when she had gone. I suggest, moreover, that when you bolted for cover, your reading spectacles were snatched from your hat by an envious sliver and that in your panic and your terror of being seen, you dared not look for them. Possibly you did not realize they had gone until you got home. And that’s why, after the rain, you stole out again — to try and find your glasses in case they were lost in a place where they might incriminate you. Then you saw the lights of Hammer Farm and dared go no further. You couldn’t endure the suspense of not knowing if the Colonel had been found. You drew nearer and Sergeant Oliphant’s torchlight shone in your eyes.”

Alleyn turned to the window and looked down at Mr. Phinn’s spinney, at the upper reaches of the Chyne and at a glimpse, between trees, of the near end of the bridge.

“That,” he said, “is how I think you moved about the landscape yesterday evening and last night.” Alleyn drew a pair of spectacles from the breast pocket of his coat and dangled them before Mr. Phinn. “I’m afraid I can’t let you have them back just yet. But”—he extended his long finger toward Mr. Phinn’s breast pocket—“isn’t that a magnifying glass you have managed to unearth?”

Mr. Phinn was silent.

“Well,” Alleyn said, “there’s our view of your activities. It’s a picture based on your own behaviour and one or two known facts. If it is accurate, believe me, you will be wise to say so.”

Mr. Phinn said in an unrecognizable voice, “And if I don’t choose to speak?”

“You will be within your rights, and we shall draw our own conclusions.”

“You still don’t give me the famous Usual Warning one hears so much about?”

“No.”

“I suppose,” Mr. Phinn said, “I am a timid man, but I know, in respect of this crime, that I am an innocent one.”

“Well, then,” Alleyn said and tried to lend the colour of freshness to an assurance he had so often given, “your innocence should cancel your timidity. You have nothing to fear.”

It seemed to Alleyn as he watched Mr. Phinn that he was looking on at the superficial signs of a profound disturbance. It was as if Mr. Phinn’s personality had been disrupted from below like a thermal pool and in a minute or two would begin to boil.

Some kind of climax was in fact achieved, and he began to talk very rapidly in his high voice.

“You are a very clever man. You reason from character to fact and back again. There! I have admitted everything. It’s all quite true. I tiffed with Cartarette. I flung my noble Fin on the bridge. I came home but did not enter my house. I walked distractedly about my garden. I repented of my gesture and returned. The Fin had gone. I sought out my rival and because of the howl of his dog — a disagreeable canine’I found him—” here Mr. Phinn shut his eyes very tight- “no, really, it was too disagreeable! Even though his hat was over his face, one knew at a glance. And the dog never even looked at one. Howl! Howl! I didn’t go near them, but I saw my fish! My trout! My Superfin! And then, you know, I heard her. Kettle. Stump, stump, stump past the willow grove. I ran, I doubled, I flung myself on my face in the undergrowth and waited until she had gone. And then I came home,” said Mr. Phinn, “and as you have surmised, I discovered the loss of my reading glasses, which I frequently keep in my hatband. I was afraid. And there you are.”

“Yes,” Alleyn said, “there we are. How do you feel about making a signed statement to this effect?”

“Another statement. O, tedious task! But I am resigned.”

“Good. We’ll leave you to write it with the aid of your reading glasses. Will you begin with the actual catching of the Old ’Un?”

Mr. Phinn nodded.

“And you are still disinclined to tell us the full substance of your discussion with Colonel Cartarette?”

Mr. Phinn nodded.

He had his back to the windows and Alleyn faced them. Sergeant Oliphant had come out of the spinney and stood at the foot of the garden. Alleyn moved up to the windows. The sergeant, when he saw him, put his thumb up and turned back into the trees.

Fox picked up the parcel of clothes.

Alleyn said, “We’ll call later for the statement. Or perhaps you would bring it to the police-station in Chyning this evening?”

“Very well.” Mr. Phinn swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “After all,” he said, “I would hardly desert my Glorious Fin. Would I?”

“You did so before. Why shouldn’t you do so again?”

“I am completely innocent.”

“Grand. We mustn’t bother you any longer. Goodbye, then, until, shall we say, five o’clock in Chyning.”

They went out by a side door and down the garden to the spinney. The path wound downhill amongst trees to a stile that gave onto the river path. Here Sergeant Oliphant waited for them. Alleyn’s homicide bag, which had been entrusted to the sergeant, rested on the stile. At the sound of their voices he turned, and they saw that across his palms there lay a sheet of newspaper.

On the newspaper were the dilapidated remains of a trout.

“I got ’er,” said Sergeant Oliphant.

“She was a short piece above the bridge on this side,” explained the sergeant, who had the habit of referring to inanimate but recalcitrant objects in the feminine gender. “Laying in some long grass to which I’d say she’d been dragged. Cat’s work, sir, as you can see by the teeth-marks.”

“As we supposed,” Alleyn agreed. “Mrs. Thomasina Twitchett’s work.”

“A nice fish; she’s been, say, two pound, but nothing to the Old ’Un,” said the sergeant.

Alleyn laid the paper and its contents on a step of the stile and hung fondly over it. Mrs. Twitchett, if indeed it was she, had made short work of most of the Colonel’s trout, if indeed this was his trout. The body was picked almost clean and some of the smaller bones had been chewed. The head appeared to have been ejected after a determined onslaught and the tail was semi-detached. But from the ribs there still depended some pieces of flesh and rags of skin that originally covered part of the flank and belly of the fish, and it was over an unlovely fragment of skin that Alleyn pored. He laid it out flat, using two pairs of pocket tweezers for the purpose, with a long finger pointed to something that might have been part of an indented scar. It was about a quarter of an inch wide and had a curved margin. It was pierced in one place as if by a short spike.

“Now blow me down flat,” Alleyn exulted, “if this isn’t the answer to the good little investigating officer’s prayer. See here, Fox, isn’t this a piece of the sort of scar we would expect to find? And look here.”

Very gingerly he turned the trout over and discovered, clinging to the other flank, a further rag of skin with the apex of a sharp triangular gap in it.

“Sink me if I don’t have a look,” Alleyn muttered.

Under Oliphant’s enchanted gaze, he opened his case, took from it a flat enamel dish, which he laid on the bottom step of the stile, and a small glass jar with a screw-on lid. Using his tweezers, he spread out the piece of skin with the triangular gap on the plate. From the glass jar he took the piece of skin that had been found on the sharp stone under the Old ’Un. Muttering and whistling under his breath, and with a delicate dexterity, he laid the second fragment beside the first, opened it out and pushed and fiddled the one into the other as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They fitted exactly.

“And that,” Alleyn said, “is why Mrs. Twitchett met us last night smelling of fresh fish when she should have been stinking of liver. O, Fate! O, Nemesis! O, Something or Another!” he apostrophized. “Thy hand is here!” And in answer to Oliphant’s glassy stare he added, “You’ve done damned handily, Sergeant, to pick this up so quickly. Now, listen, and I’ll explain.”

The explanation was detailed and exhaustive. Alleyn ended it with an account of the passage he had read in Colonel Cartarette’s book. “We’ll send out a signal to some piscatorial pundit,” he said, “and get a check. But if the Colonel was right, and he seems to have been a conscientious, knowledgeable chap, our two trout cannot exhibit identical scales. The Colonel’s killer, and only his killer can have handled both fish. We do a round-up of garments, my hearties, and hope for returns.”

Sergeant Oliphant cleared his throat and with an air of modest achievement stooped behind a briar bush. “There’s one other matter, sir,” he said. “I found this at the bottom of the hill in a bit of underbrush.”

He straightened up. In his hand was an arrow. “It appears,” he said, “to have blood on it.”

“Does it, indeed?” Alleyn said and took it. “All right, Oliphant. Damn’ good show. We’re getting on very prettily. And if,” he summarized for the benefit of the gratified and anxious Oliphant, “if it all tallies up as I believe it must, then the pattern will indeed begin to emerge, won’t it, Fox?”

“I hope so, Mr. Alleyn,” Fox rejoined cheerfully.

“So off you go, Oliphant,” Alleyn said. “Drive Mr. Fox to the station, where he will ring the Yard and the Natural History Museum. Deliver your treasure-trove to Dr. Curtis. I hope to have the rest of the exhibits before this evening. Come on, chaps, this case begins to ripen.”

He led them back to the valley, saw Oliphant and Fox on their way with an accumulation of gear and objects of interest, and himself climbed up the hill to Nunspardon.

Here, to his surprise, he ran into a sort of party. Shaded from the noontide sun on the terrace before the great house were assembled the three Lacklanders, Kitty Cartarette and Rose. It was now half past twelve, and a cocktail tray gave an appearance of conviviality to a singularly wretched-looking assembly. Lady Lacklander seemed to have retired behind her formidable façade leaving in her wake an expression of bland inscrutability. George stood in a teapot attitude: one hand in his jacket pocket, the other on the back of a chair; one neatly knickered leg straight, one bent. Mark scowled devotedly upon Rose, who was pale, had obviously wept a great deal and seemed in addition to her grief to be desperately worried. Kitty, in a tweed suit, high heels and embroidered gloves, was talking to George. She looked exhausted and faintly sulky, as if tragedy had taken her by surprise and let her down. She lent an incongruous note to a conversation piece that seemed only to lack the attendant figures of grooms with hounds in leashes. Her voice was a high-pitched one. Before she noticed Alleyn, she had completed a sentence and he had heard it: “That’s right,” she had said, “Brierley and Bentwood,” and then she saw him and made an abrupt movement that drew all their eyes upon him.

He wondered how many more times he would have to approach these people through their gardens and from an uncomfortable distance. In a way, he was beginning to enjoy it. He felt certain that this time, if George Lacklander could have managed it, the waiting group would have been scattered by a vigorous gesture, George himself would have retired to some manly den and Alleyn, in the ripeness of time, would have been admitted by a footman.

As it was, all of them except Lady Lacklander made involuntary movements which were immediately checked. Kitty half rose as if to beat a retreat, looked disconsolately at George and sank back in her chair.

“They’ve been having a council of war,” thought Alleyn.

After a moment’s further hesitation Mark, with an air of coming to a decision, put his chin up, said loudly, “It’s Mr. Alleyn,” and came to meet him. As they approached each other, Alleyn saw Rose’s face, watchful and anxious, beyond Mark’s advancing figure, and his momentary relish for the scene evaporated.

“Good morning,” Alleyn said. “I’m sorry to reappear so soon and to make a further nuisance of myself. I won’t keep you long.”

“That’s all right,” Mark said pleasantly. “Who do you want to see?”

“Why, in point of fact, all of you, if I may. I’m lucky to find you in a group like this.”

Mark had fallen into step with him and together they approached the group.

“Well, Rory,” Lady Lacklander shouted as soon as he was within range, “you don’t give us much peace, do you? What do you want this time? The clothes off our backs?”

“Yes,” Alleyn said, “I’m afraid I do. More or less.”

“And what may that mean? More or less?”

“The clothes off your yesterday-evening backs, if you please.”

“Is this what my sporadic reading has led me to understand as ‘a matter of routine’?”

“In a way,” Alleyn said coolly, “yes. Yes, it is. Routine.”

“And who,” Kitty Cartarette asked in a careworn voice of nobody in particular, “said that a policeman’s lot is not a happy one?”

This remark was followed by a curious little gap. It was as if her audience had awarded Kitty a point for attempting, under the circumstances, her small joke but at the same time were unable to accept her air of uncertain intimacy, which apparently even George found embarrassing. He laughed uncomfortably. Lady Lacklander raised her eyebrows, and Mark scowled at his boots.

“Do you mean,” Lady Lacklander said, “the clothes that we were all wearing when Maurice Cartarette was murdered?”

“I do, yes.”

“Well,” she said, “you’re welcome to mine. What was I wearing yesterday, George?”

“Really, Mama, I’m afraid I don’t…”

“Nor do I. Mark?”

Mark grinned at her. “A green tent, I fancy, Gar darling, a solar topee and a pair of grandfather’s boots.”

“You’re perfectly right. My green Harris, it was. I’ll tell my maid, Roderick, and you shall have them.”

“Thank you.” Alleyn looked at George. “Your clothes and boots, please?”

“Ah, spiked shoes and stockings and plus fours,” George said loudly. “Very old-fogeyish. Ha-ha.”

“I think they’re jolly good,” Kitty said wearily. “On the right man.” George’s hand went to his moustache, but he didn’t look at Kitty. He seemed to be exquisitely uncomfortable. “I,” Kitty added, “wore a check shirt and a twin set. Madly county, you know,” she added, desperately attempting another joke, “on account we played golf.” She sounded near to tears.

“And your shoes?” Alleyn asked.

Kitty stuck out her feet. Her legs, Alleyn noted, were good. Her feet, which were tiny, were shod in lizard-skin shoes with immensely high heels. “Not so county,” Kitty said, with the ghost of a grin, “but the best I had.”

George, apparently in an agony of embarrassment, glanced at the shoes, at his mother and at the distant prospect of the Home Spinney.

Alleyn said, “If I may, I’ll borrow the clothes, gloves and stockings. We’ll pick them up at Hammer Farm on our way back to Chyning.”

Kitty accepted this. She was looking at Alleyn with the eye, however wan, of a woman who spots a genuine Dior in a bargain basement.

“I’ll hurry back,” she said, “and get them ready for you.”

“There’s no immediate hurry.”

Mark said, “I was wearing whites. I put brogues on for going home and carried my tennis shoes.”

“And your racket?”

“Yes.

“And, after Bottom Bridge, Lady Lacklander’s sketching gear and shooting-stick?”

“That’s right.”

“By the way,” Alleyn asked him, “had you gone straight to your tennis party from Nunspardon?”

“I looked in on a patient in the village.”

“And on the gardener’s child, didn’t you?” Kitty said. “They told me you’d lanced its gumboil.”

“Yes. An abscess, poor kid,” Mark said cheerfully.

“So you had your professional bag, too?” Alleyn suggested.

“It’s not very big.”

“Still, quite a load.”

“It was rather.”

“But Lady Lacklander had left it all tidily packed up, hadn’t she?”

“Well,” Mark said with a smile at his grandmother, “more or less.”

“Nonsense,” Lady Lacklander said; “there was no more or less about it. I’m a tidy woman and I left everything tidy.”

Mark opened his mouth and shut it again.

“Your paint-rag, for instance?” Alleyn said, and Mark glanced sharply at him.

“I overlooked the rag, certainly,” said Lady Lacklander rather grandly, “when I packed up. But I folded it neatly and tucked it under the strap of my haversack. Why have you put on that look, Mark?” she added crossly.

“Well, darling, when I got there, the rag, far from being neatly folded and stowed, was six yards away on a briar bush. I rescued it and put it into your haversack.”

They all looked at Alleyn as if they expected him to make some comment. He was silent, however, and after a considerable pause Lady Lacklander said, “Well, it couldn’t be of less significance, after all. Go indoors and ask them to get the clothes together. Fisher knows what I wore.”

“Ask about mine, old boy, will you?” said George, and Alleyn wondered how many households there were left in England where orders of this sort were still given.

Lady Lacklander turned to Rose. “And what about you, child?”

But Rose stared out with unseeing eyes that had filled again with tears. She dabbed at them with her handkerchief and frowned at herself.

“Rose?” Lady Lacklander said quietly.

Still frowning, Rose turned and looked at her. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“They want to know what clothes you wore, my dear.”

“Tennis things, I imagine,” Alleyn said.

Rose said, “Oh, yes. Of course. Tennis things.”

Kitty said, “It’s the day for the cleaner. I saw your tennis things in the box, didn’t I, Rose?”

“I—? Yes,” Rose said. “I’m sorry. Yes, I did put them in.”

“Shall we go and rescue them?” Mark asked.

Rose hesitated. He looked at her for a moment and then said in a level voice, “O.K. I’ll come back,” and went into the house. Rose turned away and stood at some distance from the group.

“It’s toughest for Rose,” Kitty said, unexpectedly compassionate, and then with a return to her own self-protective mannerisms she sipped her sherry. “I wish you joy of my skirt, Mr. Alleyn,” she added loudly. “You won’t find it very delicious.”

“No?” Alleyn said, “Why not?”

“It absolutely reeks of fish.”

Alleyn observed the undistinguished little face and wondered if his own was equally blank. He then, under the guise of bewilderment, looked at the others. He found that Lady Lacklander seemed about as agitated as a Buddha and that George was in process of becoming startled. Rose was still turned away.

“Are you a fisherman too, then, Mrs. Cartarette?” Alleyn asked.

“God forbid!” she uaid with feeling. “No, I tried to take a fish away from a cat last evening.” The others gaped at her.

“My dear Kitty,” Lady Lacklander said, “I suggest that you consider what you say.”

“Why?” Kitty countered, suddenly common and arrogant. “Why? It’s the truth. What are you driving at?” she added nervously. “What’s the matter with saying I’ve got fish on my skirt? Here,” she demanded of Alleyn, “what are they getting at?”

“My good girl—” Lady Lacklander began, but Alleyn cut in. “I’m sorry, Lady Lacklander, but Mrs. Cartarette’s perfectly right. There’s nothing the matter, I assure you, with speaking the truth.” Lady Lacklander shut her mouth with a snap. “Where did you meet your cat and fish, Mrs. Cartarette?”

“This side of the bridge,” Kitty muttered resentfully.

“Did you, now?” Alleyn said with relish.

“It looked a perfectly good trout to me, and I thought the cat had no business with it. I suppose,” Kitty went on, “it was one of old Occy Phinn’s swarm; the cat, I mean. Anyhow, I tried to get the trout away from it. It hung on like a fury. And then when I did jerk the trout away, it turned out to be half eaten on the other side, sort of. So I let the cat have it back,” Kitty said limply.

Alleyn said, “Did you notice any particular mark or scar on the trout?”

“Well, hardly. It was half eaten.”

“Yes, but on the part that was left?”

“I don’t think so. Here! What sort of mark?” Kitty demanded, beginning to look alarmed.

“It doesn’t matter. Really.”

“It was quite a nice trout. I wondered if Maurice had caught it, and then I thought old Occy Phinn must have hooked it and given it to the cat. He’s crazy enough on his cats to give them anything, isn’t he, George?”

“Good God, yes!” George ejaculated automatically, without looking at Kitty.

“It’s a possible explanation,” Alleyn said as if it didn’t much matter either way.

Mark came back from the house. “The clothes,” he said to Alleyn, “will be packed up and put in your car, which has arrived, by the way. I rang up Hammer and asked them to keep back the things for the cleaner.”

“Thank you so much,” Alleyn said. He turned to Lady Lacklander. “I know you’ll understand that in a case like this we have to fuss about and try to get as complete a picture as possible of the days, sometimes even the weeks and months, before the event. It generally turns out that ninety-nine per cent of the information is quite useless, and then everybody thinks how needlessly inquisitve and impertinent the police are. Sometimes, however, there is an apparently irrelevant detail that leads, perhaps by accident, to the truth.”

Lady Lacklander stared at him like a basilisk. She had a habit of blinking slowly, her rather white eyelids dropping conspicuously like shutters: a slightly reptilian habit that was disconcerting. She blinked twice in this manner at Alleyn and said, “What are you getting at, my dear Roderick? I hope you won’t finesse too elaborately. Pray tell us what you want.”

“Certainly. I want to know if, when I arrived, you were discussing Sir Harold Lacklander’s memoirs.”

He knew by their very stillness that he had scored. It struck him, not for the first time, that people who have been given a sudden fright tend to look alike: a sort of homogeneous glassiness overtakes them.

Lady Lacklander first recovered from whatever shock they had all received.

“In point of fact we were,” she said. “You must have extremely sharp ears.”

“I caught the name of my own publishers,” Alleyn said at once. “Brierley and Bentwood. An admirable firm. I wondered if they are to do the memoirs.”

“I’m glad you approve of them,” she said dryly. “I believe they are.”

“Colonel Cartarette was entrusted with the publication, wasn’t he?”

There was a fractional pause before Mark and Rose together said, “Yes.”

“I should think,” Alleyn said pleasantly, “that that would have been a delightful job.”

George, in a strangulated voice, said something about “responsibility” and suddenly offered Alleyn a drink.

“My good George,” his mother said impatiently, “Roderick is on duty and will have none of your sherry. Don’t be an ass.”

George blushed angrily and glanced, possibly for encouragement, at Kitty.

“Nevertheless,” Lady Lacklander said with a sort of grudging bonhomie, “you may as well sit down, Rory. One feels uncomfortable when you loom. There is, after all, a chair.”

“Thank you,” Alleyn said, taking it. “I don’t want to loom any more than I can help, you know, but you can’t expect me to be all smiles and prattle when you, as a group, close your ranks with such a deafening clank whenever I approach you.”

“Nonsense,” she rejoined briskly, but a dull colour actually appeared under her weathered skin, and for a moment there was a fleeting likeness to her son. Alleyn saw that Rose Cartarette was looking at him with a sort of anguished appeal and that Mark had taken her hand.

“Well,” Alleyn said cheerfully, “if it’s all nonsense, I can forget all about it and press on with the no doubt irrelevant details. About the autobiography, for instance. I’m glad Mr. Phinn is not with us at the moment because I want to ask you if Sir Harold gives a full account of young Phinn’s tragedy. He could scarcely, one imagines, avoid doing so, could he?”

Alleyn looked from one blankly staring face to another. “Or could he?” he added.

Lady Lacklander said, “I haven’t read my husband’s memoirs. Nor, I think, has anyone else, except Maurice.”

“Do you mean, Lady Lacklander, that you haven’t read them in their entirety, or that you haven’t read or heard a single word of them?”

“We would discuss them. Sometimes I could refresh his memory.”

“Did you discuss the affair of young Ludovic Phinn?”

“Never!” she said very loudly and firmly, and George made a certain noise in his throat.

Alleyn turned to Kitty and Rose.

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “Colonel Cartarette may have said something about the memoirs?”

“Not to me,” Kitty said and added, “Too pukka sahib.”

There was an embarrassed stirring among the others.

“Well,” Alleyn said, “I’m sorry to labour the point, but I should like to know, if you please, whether either Sir Harold Lacklander or Colonel Cartarette ever said anything to any of you about the Ludovic Phinn affair in connection with the memoirs.”

“Damned if I see what you’re getting at!” George began, to the dismay, Alleyn felt sure, of everybody who heard him. “Damned if I see how you make out my father’s memoirs can have anything to do with Maurice Cartarette’s murder. Sorry, Kitty. I beg pardon, Rose. But I mean to say!”

Alleyn said, “It’s eighteen years since young Ludovic Danberry-Phinn committted suicide, and a war has intervened. Many people will have forgotten his story. One among those who have remembered it… his father… must dread above all things any revival.” He leant forward in his chair, and as if he had given some kind of order or exercised some mesmeric influence on his audience, each member of it imitated this movement. George Lacklander was still empurpled, the others had turned very pale, but one expression was common to them all: they looked, all of them, extremely surprised. In Kitty and George and perhaps in Lady Lacklander, Alleyn thought he sensed a kind of relief. He raised his hand. “Unless, of course,” he said, “it has come about that in reviving the tragedy through the memoirs, young Phinn’s name will be cleared.”

It was as if out of a cloth that had apparently been wrung dry an unexpected trickle was induced. George, who seemed to be the most vulnerable of the group, shouted, “You’ve no right to assume…” and got no further. Almost simultaneously Mark and Rose, with the occasional unanimity of lovers, said, “This won’t do…” and were checked by an imperative gesture from Lady Lacklander.

“Roderick,” Lady Lacklander demanded, “have you been talking to Octavious Phinn?”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “I have come straight here from Jacob’s Cottage.”

“Wait a bit, Mama,” George blurted out. “Wait a bit! Octavius can’t have said anything. Otherwise, don’t you see, Alleyn wouldn’t try to find out from us.”

In the now really deathly silence that followed this speech, Lady Lacklander turned and blinked at her son.

“You ninny, George,” she said, “you unfathomable fool.”

And Alleyn thought he now knew the truth about Mr. Phinn, Colonel Cartarette and Sir Harold Lacklander’s memoirs.