Scales of Justice (7 page)

Her father went out to call on Mr. Octavius Danberry-Phinn. He took his fishing gear with him as he intended to go straight on to his meeting with Lady Lacklander and to ease his troubled mind afterwards with the evening rise. He also took his spaniel Skip, who was trained to good behaviour when he accompanied his master to the trout stream.

Lady Lacklander consulted the diamond-encrusted watch which was pinned to her tremendous bosom and discovered that it was now seven o’clock. She had been painting for half an hour and an all-too-familiar phenomenon had emerged from her efforts.

“It’s a curious thing,” she meditated, “that a woman of my character and determination should produce such a puny affair. However, it’s got me in better trim for Maurice Cartarette, and that’s a damn’ good thing. An hour to go if he’s punctual, and he’s sure to be that.”

She tilted her sketch and ran a faint green wash over the foreground. When it was partly dry, she rose from her stool, tramped some distance away to the crest of a hillock, seated herself on her shooting-stick and contemplated her work through a lorgnette tricked out with diamonds. The shooting-stick sank beneath her in the soft meadowland so that the disk which was designed to check its descent was itself imbedded to the depth of several inches. When Lady Lacklander returned to her easel, she merely abandoned her shooting-stick, which remained in a vertical position and from a distance looked a little like a giant fungoid growth. Sticking up above intervening hillocks and rushes, it was observed over the top of his glasses by the longsighted Mr. Phinn when, accompanied by Thomasina Twitchett, he came nearer to Bottom Bridge. Keeping on the right bank, he began to cast his fly in a somewhat mannered but adroit fashion over the waters most often frequented by the Old ’Un. Lady Lacklander, whose ears were as sharp as his, heard the whirr of his reel and, remaining invisible, was perfectly able to deduce the identity and movements of the angler. At the same time, far above them on Watt’s Hill, Colonel Cartarette, finding nobody but seven cats at home at Jacob’s Cottage, walked round the house and looking down into the little valley at once spotted both Lady Lacklander and Mr. Phinn, like figures in Nurse Kettle’s imaginary map, the one squatting on her camp stool, the other in slow motion near Bottom Bridge.

“I’ve time to speak to him before I see her,” thought the Colonel. “But I’ll leave it here in case we don’t meet.” He posted his long envelope in Mr. Phinn’s front door, and then, greatly troubled in spirit, he made for the river path and went down into the valley, the old spaniel, Skip, walking at his heels.

Nurse Kettle, looking through the drawing-room window at Uplands, caught sight of the Colonel before he disappeared beyond Commander Syce’s spinney. She administered a final tattoo with the edges of her muscular hands on Commander Syce’s lumbar muscles and said, “There goes the Colonel for the evening rise. You wouldn’t have stood
that
amount of punishment two days ago, would you?”

“No,” a submerged voice said, “I suppose not.”

“Well! So that’s all I get for my trouble.”

“No, no! Look here, look here!” he gabbled, twisting his head in an attempt to see her. “Good heavens! What are you saying?”

“All right. I know. I was only pulling your leg. There!” she said. “That’s all for to-day and I fancy it won’t be long before I wash my hands of you altogether.”

“Of course I can’t expect to impose on your kindness any longer.”

Nurse Kettle was clearing up. She appeared not to hear this remark and presently bustled away to wash her hands. When she returned, Syce was sitting on the edge of his improvised bed. He wore slacks, a shirt, a scarf and a dressing gown.

“Jolly D.,” said Nurse Kettle. “Done it all yourself.”

“I hope you will give me the pleasure of joining me for a drink before you go.”

“On duty?”

“Isn’t it off duty, now?”

“Well,” said Nurse Kettle, “I’ll have a drink with you, but I hope it won’t mean that when I’ve gone on me way rejoicing, you’re going to have half a dozen more with yourself.”

Commander Syce turned red and muttered something about a fellah having nothing better to do.

“Get along,” said Nurse Kettle, “find something better. The idea!”

They had their drinks, looking at each other with an air of comradeship. Commander Syce, using a walking-stick and holding himself at an unusual angle, got out an album of photographs taken when he was on the active list in the navy. Nurse Kettle adored photographs and was genuinely interested in a long sequence of naval vessels, odd groups of officers and views of seaports. Presently she turned a page and discovered quite a dashing water-colour of a corvette and then an illustrated menu with lively little caricatures in the margin. These she greatly admired and observing a terrified and defiant expression on the face of her host, ejaculated, “You never did these yourself! You
did
! Well, aren’t you the clever one!”

Without answering, he produced a small portfolio, which he silently thrust at her. It contained many more sketches. Although Nurse Kettle knew nothing about pictures, she did, she maintained, know what she liked. And she liked these very much indeed. They were direct statements of facts, and she awarded them direct statements of approval and was about to shut the portfolio when a sketch that had faced the wrong way round caught her attention. She turned it over. It was of a woman lying on a chaise-longue smoking a cigarette in a jade holder. A bougainvillea flowered in the background.

“Why,” Nurse Kettle ejaculated. “Why, that’s Mrs. Cartarette!”

If Syce had made some kind of movement to snatch the sketch from her, he checked himself before it was completed. He said very rapidly, “Party. Met her Far East. Shore leave. Forgotten all about it.”

“That would be before they’were married, wouldn’t it?” Nurse Kettle remarked with perfect simplicity. She shut the portfolio, said, “You know I believe you could make my picture-map of Swevenings,” and told him of her great desire for one. When she got up and collected her belongings, he too rose, but with an ejaculation of distress.

“I see I haven’t made a job of you yet,” she remarked. “Same time to-morrow suit you?”

“Admirably,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” He gave her one of his rare painful smiles and watched her as she walked down the path towards his spinney. It was now a quarter to nine.

Nurse Kettle had left her bicycle in the village, where she was spending the evening with the Women’s Institute. She therefore took the river path. Dusk had fallen over the valley of the Chyne, and as she descended into it, her own footfall sounded unnaturally loud on the firm turf. Thump, thump, thump she went, down the hillside. Once, she stopped dead, tilted her head and listened. From behind her at Uplands came the not unfamiliar sound of a twang followed by a sharp penetrating blow. She smiled to herself and walked on. Only desultory rural sounds disturbed the quiet of nightfall. She could actually hear the cool voice of the stream.

She did not cross Bottom Bridge but followed a rough path along the right bank of the Chyne, past a group of elders and another of willows. This second group, extending in a sickle-shaped mass from the water’s edge into Bottom Meadow, rose up vapourishly in the dusk. She could smell willow leaves and wet soil. As sometimes happens when we are solitary, she had the sensation of being observed, but she was not a fanciful woman and soon dismissed this feeling.

“It’s turned much cooler,” she thought.

A cry of mourning, intolerably loud, rose from beyond the willows and hung on the night air. A thrush whirred out of the thicket close to her face, and the cry broke and wavered again. It was the howl of a dog.

She pushed through the thicket into an opening by the river and found the body of Colonel Cartarette with his spaniel Skip beside it, mourning him.

Nurse Kettle was acquainted with death. She did not need Skip’s lament to tell her that the curled figure resting its head on a turf of river grass was dead. She knelt beside it and pushed her hand under the tweed jacket and silk shirt. “Cooling,” she thought. A tweed hat with fisherman’s flies in the band lay over the face. Someone, she thought, might almost have dropped it there. She lifted it and remained quite still with it suspended in her hand. The Colonel’s temple had been broken as if his head had come under a waxworker’s hammer. The spaniel threw back his head and howled again.

“O, do be quiet!” Nurse Kettle ejaculated. She replaced the hat and stood up, knocking her head against a branch. The birds that spent the night in the willows stirred again and some of them flew out with a sharp whirring sound. The Chyne gurgled and plopped and somewhere up in Nunspardon woods an owl hooted. “He has been murdered,” thought Nurse Kettle.

Through her mind hurtled all the axioms of police procedure as laid down in her chosen form of escape-literature. One must, she recollected, not touch the body, and she had touched it. One must send at once for the police, but she had nobody to send. She thought there was also something about not leaving the body, yet to telephone or to fetch Mr. Oliphant, the police-sergeant at Chyning, she would have to leave the body, and while she was away, the spaniel, she supposed, would sit beside it and howl. It was now quite darkish and the moon not yet up. She could see, however, not far from the Colonel’s hands, the glint of a trout’s scales in the grass and of a knife blade nearby. His rod was laid out on the lip of the bank, less than a pace from where he lay. None of these things, of course, must be disturbed. Suddenly Nurse Kettle thought of Commander Syce, whose Christian name she had discovered was Geoffrey, and wished with all her heart that he was at hand to advise her. The discovery in herself of this impulse astonished her and, in a sort of flurry, she swapped Geoffrey Syce for Mark Lacklander. “I’ll find the doctor,” she thought.

She patted Skip. He whimpered and scratched at her knees with his paws. “Don’t howl, doggy,” she said in a trembling voice. “Good boy! Don’t howl.” She took up her bag and turned away.

As she made her way out of the willow grove, she wondered for the first time about the identity of the being who had reduced Colonel Cartarette to the status of a broken waxwork. A twig snapped. “Suppose,” she thought, “he’s still about! Help, what a notion!” And as she hurried back along the path to Bottom Bridge, she tried not to think of the dense shadows and dark hollows that lay about her. Up on Watt’s Hill the three houses — Jacob’s Cottage, Uplands and Hammer — all had lighted windows and drawn blinds. They looked very far off to Nurse Kettle.

She crossed Bottom Bridge and climbed the zigzag path that skirted the golf course, coming finally to the Nunspardon Home Spinney. Only now did she remember that her flash-lamp was in her bag. She got it out and found that she was breathless. “Too quick up the hill,” she thought. “Keep your shirt on, Kettle.” River Path proper ran past the spinney to the main road, but a by-path led up through the trees into the grounds of Nunspardon. This she took and presently came out into the open gardens with the impressive Georgian façade straight ahead of her.

The footman who answered the front door bell was well enough known to her. “Yes, it’s me again, William,” she said. “Is the doctor at home?”

“He came in about an hour ago, miss.”

“I want to see him. It’s urgent.”

“The family’s in the library, miss. I’ll ascertain…”

“Don’t bother,” said Nurse Kettle. “Or, yes. Ascertain if you like, but I’ll be hard on your heels. Ask him if he’ll come out here and speak to me.”

He looked dubiously at her, but something in her face must have impressed him. He crossed the great hall and opened the library door. He left it open and Nurse Kettle heard him say, “Miss Kettle to see Dr. Lacklander, my lady.”

“Me?” said Mark’s voice. “O Lord! All right, I’ll come.”

“Bring her in here,” Lady Lacklander’s voice commanded. “Talk to her in here, Mark. I want to see Kettle.” Hearing this, Nurse Kettle, without waiting to be summoned, walked quickly into the library. The three Lacklanders had turned in their chairs. George and Mark got up. Mark looked sharply at her and came quickly towards her. Lady Lacklander said, “Kettle! What’s happened to
you
!”

Nurse Kettle said, “Good evening, Lady Lacklander. Good evening, Sir George.” She put her hands behind her back and looked full at Mark. “May I speak to you, sir?” she said. “There’s been an accident.”

“All right, Nurse,” Mark said. “To whom?”

“To Colonel Cartarette, sir.”

The expression of enquiry seemed to freeze on their faces. It was as if they retired behind newly assumed masks.

“What sort of accident?” Mark said.

He stood behind Nurse Kettle and his grandmother and father. She shaped the word “killed” with her lips and tongue.

“Come out here,” he muttered and took her by the arm.

“Not at all,” his grandmother said. She heaved herself out of her chair and bore down upon them. “Not at all, Mark. What has happened to Maurice Cartarette? Don’t keep things from me; I am probably in better trim to meet an emergency than anyone else in this house. What has happened to Maurice?”

Mark, still holding Nurse Kettle by the arm, said, “Very well, Gar. Nurse Kettle will tell us what has happened.”

“Let’s have it, then. And in case it’s as bad as you look, Kettle, I suggest we all sit down. What did you say, George?”

Her son had made an indeterminate noise. He now said galvanically, “Yes, of course, Mama, by all means.”

Mark pushed a chair forward for Nurse Kettle, and she took it thankfully. Her knees, she discovered, were wobbling.

“Now, then, out with it,” said Lady Lacklander. “He’s dead, isn’t he, Kettle?”

“Yes, Lady Lacklander.”

“Where?” Sir George demanded. Nurse Kettle told him.

“When,” Lady Lacklander said, “did you discover him?”

“I’ve come straight up here, Lady Lacklander.”

“But why here, Kettle? Why not to Uplands?”

“I must break it to Kitty,” said Sir George.

“I must go to Rose,” said Mark simultaneously.

“Kettle,” said Lady Lacklander, “you used the word accident. What accident?”

“He has been murdered, Lady Lacklander,” said Nurse Kettle.

The thought that crossed her mind after she had made this announcement was that the three Lacklanders were, in their several generations, superficially very much alike but that whereas in Lady Lacklander and Mark the distance between the eyes and the width of mouth suggested a certain generosity, in Sir George they seemed merely to denote ’the naïve. Sir George’s jaw had dropped, and handsome though he undoubtedly was, he gaped unhandsomely. As none of them spoke, she added, “So I thought I’d better report to you, sir.”

“Do you mean,” Sir George said loudly, “that he’s lying there in my bottom meadow, murdered?”

“Yes, Sir George,” Nurse Kettle said, “I do.”

“How?” Mark said.

“Injuries to the head.”

“You made quite sure, of course?”

“Quite sure.”

Mark looked at his father. “We must ring the Chief Constable,” he said. “Would you do that, Father? I’ll go down with Nurse Kettle. One of us had better stay there till the police come. If you can’t get the C.C., would you ring Sergeant Oliphant at Chyning?”

Sir George’s hand went to his moustache. “I think,” he said, “you may take it, Mark, that I understand my responsibilities.”

Lady Lacklander said, “Don’t be an ass, George. The boy’s quite right,” and her son, scarlet in the face, went off to the telephone. “Now,” Lady Lacklander continued, “what are we going to do about Rose and that wife of his?”

“Gar…” Mark began, but his grandmother raised a fat glittering hand.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “No doubt you want to break it to Rose, Mark, but in my opinion you will do better to let me see both of them first. I shall stay there until you appear. Order the car.”

Mark rang the bell. “And you needn’t wait,” she added. “Take Miss Kettle with you.” It was characteristic of Lady Lacklander that she restricted her use of the more peremptory form of address to the second person. She now used it. “Kettle,” she said, “we’re grateful to you and mustn’t impose. Would you rather come with me or go back with my grandson? Which is best, do you think?”

“I’ll go with the doctor, thank you, Lady Lacklander. I suppose,” Nurse Kettle added composedly, “that as I found the body, I’ll be required to make a statement.”

She had moved with Mark to the door when Lady Lacklander’s voice checked her.

“And I suppose,” the elderly voice said, “that as I may have been the last person to speak to him, I shall be required to make one, too.”

In the drawing-room at Hammer there was an incongruous company assembled. Kitty Cartarette, Mark Lacklander and Nurse Kettle waited there while Lady Lacklander sat with Rose in the Colonel’s study. She had arrived first at Hammer, having been driven round in her great car while Mark and Nurse Kettle waited in the valley and George rang up the police station at Chyning. George had remembered he was a Justice of the Peace and was believed to be in telephonic conference with his brethren of the bench.

So it had fallen to Lady Lacklander to break the news to Kitty, whom she had found, wearing her black-velvet tights and flame-coloured top, in the drawing-room. Lady Lacklander in the course of a long life spent in many embassies had encountered every kind of eccentricity in female attire and was pretty well informed as to the predatory tactics of women whom, in the Far East, she had been wont to describe as “light cruisers.” She had made up her mind about Kitty Cartarette but had seemed to be prepared to concede her certain qualities if she showed any signs of possessing them.

She had said, “My dear, I’m the bearer of bad tidings,” and noticing that Kitty at once looked very frightened, had remarked to herself, “She thinks I mean to tackle her about George.”

“Are you?” Kitty had said. “What sort of tidings, please?”

“About Maurice.” Lady Lacklander had waited for a moment, added, “I’m afraid it’s the worst kind of news,” and had then told her. Kitty stared at her “Dead?” she said. “Maurice dead? I don’t believe you. How can he be dead? He’s been fishing down below there and I daresay he’s looked in at the pub.” Her hands with their long painted nails began to tremble. “How can he be dead?” she repeated.

Lady Lacklander became more specific, and presently Kitty broke into a harsh strangulated sobbing, twisting her fingers together and turning her head aside. She walked about the room, still, Lady Lacklander noticed, swaying her hips. Presently she fetched up by a grog tray on a small table and shakily poured herself a drink.

“That’s a sensible idea,” Lady Lacklander said as the neck of the decanter chattered against the glass. Kitty-awkwardly offered her a drink, which she declined with perfect equanimity. “Her manner,” she thought to herself, “is really too dreadful. What shall I do if George marries her?”

It was at this juncture that Nurse Kettle and Mark had appeared outside the French windows. Lady Lacklander signalled to them. “Here are my grandson and Nurse Kettle,” she said to Kitty. “Shall they come in? I think it would be a good idea, don’t you?”

Kitty said shakily, “Yes, please. Yes, if you like.” Lady Lacklander heaved her bulk out of her chair and let them in.

“Sergeant Oliphant’s there,” Mark murmured. “They’re going to ring Scotland Yard. Does Rose…?”

“Not yet. She’s out in the garden, somewhere.”

Mark went across to Kitty and spoke to her with a quiet authority that his grandmother instantly approved. She noticed how Kitty steadied under it, how Mark, without fussing, got her into a chair. Nurse Kettle, as a matter of course, came forward and took the glass when Kitty had emptied it. A light and charming voice sang in the hall:

“Come away, come away, death…” and Mark turned sharply.

“I’ll go,” his grandmother said, “and I’ll fetch you when she asks for you.”

With a swifter movement than either her size or her age would have seemed to allow she had gone into the hall. The little song of death stopped, and the door shut behind Lady Lacklander.

Kitty Cartarette was quieter but still caught her breath now and again in a harsh sob.

“Sorry,” she said looking from Nurse Kettle to Mark. “Thanks. It’s just the shock.”

“Yes, of course, dear,” Nurse Kettle said.

“I sort of can’t believe it. You know?”

“Yes, of course,” Mark said.

“It seems so queer… Maurice!” She looked at Mark.

“What was that,” she said, “about somebody doing it? Is it true?”

“I’m afraid it looks very much like it.”

“I’d forgotten,” she muttered vaguely. “You’ve seen him, haven’t you, and you’re a doctor, of course.” Her mouth trembled. She wiped the back of her hand over it. A trail of red was dragged across her cheek. It was a sufficient indication of her state of mind that she seemed to be unaware of it. She said, “No, it’s no good, I can’t believe it. We saw him down there, fishing.” And then she suddenly demanded, “Where’s George?”

Nurse Kettle saw Mark’s back stiffen. “My father?” he asked.

“O, yes, of course, I’d forgotten,” she said again, shaking her head. “He’s your father. Silly of me.”

“He’s looking after one or two things that must be done. You see, the police have had to be told at once.”

“Is George getting the police?”

“He’s rung them up. He will, I think, come here as soon as he can.”

“Yes,” she said. “I expect he will.”

Nurse Keetle saw George’s son compress his lips. At that moment George himself walked in and the party became even less happily assorted.

Nurse Kettle had acquired a talent for retiring into whatever background presented itself, and this talent she now exercised. She moved through the open French window onto the terrace, shut the door after her and sat on a garden seat within view of the drawing-room but facing across the now completely dark valley. Mark, who would perhaps have liked to follow her, stood his ground. His father, looking extraordinarily handsome and not a little self-conscious, went straight to Kitty. She used the gesture that Mark had found embarrassing and extended her left hand to Sir George, who kissed it with an air nicely compounded of embarrassment, deference, distress and devotion.