Scales of Justice (26 page)

“Mrs. Cartarette,” Alleyn said, “I am going to ask you if when you played golf with Sir George Lacklander, he lent you his mother’s shoes. Before you answer me, I must warn you—”

Nurse Kettle didn’t hear the Usual Warning. She was looking at Kitty Cartarette, in whose face she saw guilt itself. Before this dreadful symptom her own indignation faltered and was replaced, as it were professionally, by a composed, reluctant and utterly useless compassion.

“George,” Lady Lacklander said to her son, “we shall, if you please, get this thing straightened out. There must be no reservations before Mark or—” she waved her fat hand at a singularly still figure in a distant chair—“or Octavius. Everything will come out later on. We may as well know where we are now, among ourselves. There must be no more evasions.”

George looked up and muttered, “Very well, Mama.”

“I knew, of course,” his mother went on, “that you were having one of your elephantine flirtations with this wretched, unhappy creature. I was afraid that you had been fool enough to tell her about your father’s memoirs and all the fuss over Chapter 7. What I must know, now, is how far your affair with her may be said to have influenced her in what she did.”

“My God!” George said. “I don’t know.”

“Did she hope to marry you, George? Did you say things like: ‘If only you were free,’ to her?”

“Yes,” George said, “I did.” He looked miserably at his mother and added, “You see, she wasn’t. So it didn’t seem to matter.”

Lady Lacklander snorted but not with her usual brio. “And the memoirs? What did you say to her about them?”

“I just told her about that damned Chapter 7. I just said that if Maurice consulted her, I hoped she’d sort of weigh in on our side. And I — when that was no use — I–I said — that if he did publish, you know, it’d make things so awkward between the families that we — well—”

“All right. I see. Go on.”

“She knew he had the copy of Chapter 7 when he went out. She told me that — afterwards — this morning. She said she couldn’t ask the police about it, but she knew he’d taken it.”

Lady Lacklander moved slightly. Mr. Phinn made a noise in his throat.

“Well, Occy?” she said.

Mr. Phinn, summoned by telephone and strangely acquiescent, said, “My dear Lady L., I can only repeat what I’ve already told you; had you all relied on my discretion, as I must acknowledge Cartarette did, there would have been no cause for anxiety on any of your parts over Chapter 7.”

“You’ve behaved very handsomely, Occy.”

“No, no,” he said. “Believe me, no.”

“Yes, you have. You put us to shame. Go on, George.”

“I don’t know that there’s anything more. Except—”

“Answer me this, George. Did you suspect her?”

George put his great elderly hand across his eyes and said, “I don’t know, Mama. Not at once. Not last night. But this morning. She came by herself, you know. Mark called for Rose. I came downstairs and found her in the hall. It seemed queer. As if she’d been doing something odd.”

“From what Rory tells us, she’d been putting my shoes, that you’d lent her without my leave, in the downstairs cloakroom,” Lady Lacklander said grimly.

“I am completely at a loss,” Mr. Phinn said suddenly.

“Naturally you are, Occy.” Lady Lacklander told him about the shoes. “She felt, of course, that she had to get rid of them. They’re the ones I wear for sketching when I haven’t got a bad toe, and my poor fool of a maid packed them up with the other things. Go on, George.”

“Later on, after Alleyn had gone and you went indoors, I talked to her. She was sort of different,” said poor George, “Well, damned hard. Sort of almost suggesting — well, I mean, it wasn’t exactly the thing.”

“I wish you would contrive to be more articulate. She suggested that it wouldn’t be long before you’d pay your addresses?”

“Er — er—”

“And then?”

“I suppose I looked a bit taken aback. I don’t know what I said. And then — it really was pretty frightful — she sort of began, not exactly hinting, but — well—”

“Hinting,” Lady Lacklander said, “will do.”

“—that if the police found Chapter 7, they’d begin to think that I — that we — that—”

“Yes, George. We understand. Motive.”

“It really was frightful. I said I thought it would be better if we didn’t sort of meet much. It was just that I suddenly felt I couldn’t. Only that, I assure you, Mama. I assure you, Octavius.”

“Yes, yes,” they said. “All right, George.”

“And then, when I said that, she suddenly looked—” George said this with an unexpected flash—“like a snake.”

“And you, my poor boy,” his mother added, “looked, no doubt, like the proverbial rabbit.”

“I feel I’ve behaved like one, anyway,” George rejoined with a unique touch of humour.

“You’ve behaved very badly, of course,” his mother said without rancour. “You’ve completely muddled your values. Just like poor Maurice himself, only he went still further. You led a completely unscrupulous trollop to suppose that if she was a widow, you’d marry her. You would certainly have bored her even more than poor Maurice, but Occy will forgive me if I suggest that your title and your money and Nunspardon offered sufficient compensation. You may, on second thoughts, even have attracted her, George,” his mother added. “I mustn’t, I suppose, underestimate your simple charms.” She contemplated her agonized son for a few minutes and then said, “It all comes to this, and I said as much to Kettle a few days ago: we can’t afford to behave shabbily, George. We’ve got to stick to our own standards, such as they are, and we daren’t muddle our values. Let’s hope Mark and Rose between them will pick up the pieces.” She turned to Mr. Phinn. “If any good has come out of this dreadful affair, Occy,” she said, “it is this. You have crossed the Chyne after I don’t know how many years and paid a visit to Nunspardon. God knows we have no right to expect it. We can’t make amends, Occy. We can’t pretend to try. And there it is. It’s over, as they say nowadays, to you.” She held out her hand and Mr. Phinn, after a moment’s hesitation, came forward to take it.

“You see, Oliphant,” Alleyn said with his customary air of diffidence, “at the outset it tied up with what all of you told me about the Colonel himself. He was an unusually punctilious man. ‘Oddly formal,’ the Chief Constable said, ‘and devilishly polite, especially with people he didn’t like or had fallen out with.’ He had fallen out with the Lacklanders. One couldn’t imagine him squatting on his haunches and going on with his job if Lacklander or his mother turned up in the punt. Or old Phinn, with whom he’d had a flaring row. Then, as you and Gripper pointed out, the first injury had been the sort of blow that is struck by a quarryman on a peg projecting from a cliff-face at knee level, or by an underhand service. Or, you might have added, by a golfer. It seemed likely, too, that the murderer knew the habit of the punt and the counter-current of the Chyne and the fact that where the punt came to rest in the willow-grove bay it was completely masked by trees. You will remember that we found one of Mrs. Cartarette’s distinctive yellow hairpins in the punt in close association with a number of cigarette butts, some with lipstick and some not.”

“Ah,” Sergeant Oliphant said. “Dalliance, no doubt.”

“No doubt. When I floated down the stream into the little bay and saw how the daisy heads had been cut off and where they lay, I began to see, also, a figure in the punt idly swinging a club: a figure so familiar to the Colonel that after an upward glance and a word of greeting, he went on cutting grass for his fish. Perhaps, urged by George Lacklander, she asked her husband to suppress the alternative version to Chapter 7 and perhaps he refused. Perhaps Lacklander, in his infatuation, had told her that if she was free, he’d marry her. Perhaps anger and frustration flooded suddenly up to her savage little brain and down her arms into her hands. There was that bald head, like an immense exaggeration of the golf balls she had swiped at under Lacklander’s infatuated tuition. She had been slashing idly at the daisies, now she made a complete backswing, and in a moment her husband was curled up on the bank with the imprint of her club on his temple. From that time on she became a murderess fighting down her panic and frantically engaged in the obliteration of evidence. The print of the golf-club was completely wiped out by her nightmare performance with the shooting-stick, which she had noticed on her way downhill. She tramped on the Colonel’s trout, and there was the print of her spiked heel on its hide. She grabbed up the trout and was frantic to get rid of it when she saw Mr. Phinn’s cat. One can imagine her watching to see if Thomasina would eat the fish and her relief when she found that she would. She had seen the Old ’Un on the bridge. No doubt she had heard at least the fortissimo passages of Phinn’s quarrel with the Colonel. Perhaps the Old ’Un would serve as false evidence. She fetched it and put it down by the body, but in handling the great trout, she let it brush against her skirt. Then she replaced the shooting-stick. Lady Lacklander’s paint-rag was folded under the strap of her rucksack. Kitty Cartarette’s hands were fishy. She used the rag to wipe them. Then, although she was about to thrust the shooting-stick back into the earth, she saw, probably round the collar of the spike, horrible traces of the use she had made of it. She twisted it madly about in the rag, which was, of course, already extensively stained with paint. No doubt she would have refolded the rag and replaced it, but she heard, may even have seen, Dr. Lacklander. She dropped the rag and bolted for cover. When she emerged, she found he had taken away all the painting gear.” Alleyn paused and rubbed his nose. “I wonder,” he said, “if it entered her head that Lady Lacklander might be implicated. I wonder exactly when she remembered that she herself was wearing Lady Lacklander’s shoes.”

He looked from Fox to Oliphant and the attentive Gripper.

“When she got home,” he said, “no doubt she at once bathed and changed. She put out her tweed skirt to go to the cleaners. Having attended very carefully to the heel, she then polished Lady Lacklander’s shoes. I think that heel must have worried her more than anything else. She guessed that Lacklander hadn’t told his mother he’d borrowed the shoes. As we saw this morning, she had no suitable shoes of her own, and her feet are much smaller than her stepdaughter’s. She drove herself over to Nunspardon this morning and instead of ringing, walked in and put the shoes in the downstairs cloakroom. I suppose Lady Lacklander’s maid believed her mistress to have worn them and accordingly packed them up with her clothes instead of the late Sir Harold’s boots which she had actually worn.”

Fox said, “When you asked for everybody’s clothes, Mrs. Cartarette remembered, of course, that her skirt would smell of fish.”

“Yes. She’d put it in the box for the dry cleaning. When she realized we might get hold of the skirt, she remembered the great trout brushing against it. With a mixture of bravado and cunning which is, I think, very characteristic, she boldly told me it would smell of fish and had the nerve and astuteness to use Thomasina as a sort of near-the-truth explanation. She only altered one fact. She said she tried to take a fish away from a cat, whereas she had given a fish to a cat. If she’d read her murdered husband’s book, she’d have known that particular cat wouldn’t jump, and the story was, in fact, a bit too fishy. The scales didn’t match.”

Oliphant said suddenly, “It’s a terrible thing to happen in the Vale. Terrible the things that’ll come out! How’s Sir George going to look?”

“He’s going to look remarkably foolish,” Alleyn said with some heat, “which is no more than he deserves. He’s behaved very badly, as his mother has no doubt pointed out to him. What’s more, he’s made things beastly and difficult for his son, who’s a good chap, and for Rose Cartarette, who’s a particularly nice child. I should say Sir George Lacklander has let his side down. Of course, he was no match at all for a woman of her hardihood; he’d have been safer with a puff-adder than with Kitty Cartarette, née, Heaven help her, de Vere.”

“What, sir, do you reckon—” Oliphant began, and catching sight of his superior’s face, was silent.

Alleyn said harshly, “The case will rest on expert evidence of a sort never introduced before. If her counsel is clever and lucky, she’ll get an acquittal. If he’s not so clever and a bit unlucky, she’ll get a lifer.” He looked at Fox. “Shall we go?” he said.

He thanked Oliphant and Gripper for their work and went out to the car.

Oliphant said, “Has something upset the Chief, Mr. Fox?”

“Don’t you worry,” Fox said. “It’s the kind of case he doesn’t fancy. Capital charge and a woman. Gets to thinking about what he calls first causes.”

“First causes?” Oliphant repeated dimly.

“Society. Civilization. Or something,” Fox said. “I mustn’t keep him waiting. So long.”

“Darling, darling Rose,” Mark said. “We’re in for a pretty ghastly time, I know. But we’re in for it together, my dearest love, and I’ll watch over you and be with you, and when it’s all done with, we’ll have each other and love each other more than ever before. Won’t we? Won’t we?”

“Yes,” Rose said clinging to him. “We will, won’t we?”

“So that something rather wonderful will come out of it all,” Mark said. “I promise it will. You’ll see.”

“As long as we’re together.”

“That’s right,” Mark said. “Being together is everything.”

And with one of those tricks that memory sometimes plays upon us, Colonel Cartarette’s face, as Mark had last seen it in life, rose up clearly in his mind. It wore a singularly compassionate smile.

Together, they drove back to Nunspardon.

Nurse Kettle drove in bottom gear to the top of Watt’s Hill and there paused. On an impulse, or perhaps inspired by some unacknowledged bit of wishful thinking, she got out and looked down on the village of Swevening. Dusk had begun to seep discreetly into the valley. Smoke rose in cosy plumes from one or two chimneys; roofs cuddled into their surrounding greenery. It was a circumspect landscape. Nurse Kettle revived her old fancy. “As pretty as a picture,” she thought wistfully and was again reminded of an illustrated map. With a sigh, she turned back to her faintly trembling car. She was about to seat herself when she heard a kind of strangulated hail. She looked back and there, limping through the dusk, came Commander Syce. The nearer he got to Nurse Kettle, the redder in the face they both became. She lost her head slightly, clambered into her car, turned her engine off and turned it on again. “Pull yourself together, Kettle,” she said and leaning out shouted in an unnatural voice, “The top of the evening to you.”