The Beast Must Die (25 page)

INSPECTOR BLOUNT HAD
left word for Nigel to come down to the police station as soon as he returned. As the car took him there, he reviewed the disappearance of Phil, pieced together from the almost incoherent words of Lena and Felix Cairnes. In the confusion from last night’s attack on Nigel, no one had noticed that Phil had not been in the hotel for breakfast. Felix assumed he had already had breakfast before he himself came down; Georgia had been too busy attending to Nigel; the hotel waiter thought the boy must have gone to his mother’s house for breakfast. So it was not till the housemaid entered Phil’s bedroom at 10 a.m., and found the bed had not been slept in, that anyone realised he was gone. She had also found, on the chest of drawers, an envelope addressed to Inspector Blount. What this envelope contained Blount had not yet divulged, but Nigel thought he could make a pretty accurate guess.

Felix Cairnes was almost distraught with anxiety. Nigel had never felt so deeply sorry for him. He wished he could spare him the tragedy which must ensue, but he knew that was impossible now. Things had started to move, and one had no more hope of stopping them than of checking a landslide or the launching of a liner when the button has once been pressed. The tragedy had begun when George Rattery ran down Martie Cairnes in that country lane. It had begun, you might even say, before Phil Rattery was
born
. These latest events were its catastrophe. There remained now only the epilogue. But that epilogue would be long and painful. It would not be finished till whatever span of life was left to Felix Cairnes, to Violet, to Lena and Phil, was also ended.

Inspector Blount, when Nigel found him in the police station, had an air of subdued triumph. He told Nigel of the steps that had been taken to find Phil: railway and bus stations watched, AA men warned, lorry drivers questioned. It was only a matter of time. ‘Though,’ he added very seriously, ‘it may turn out to be a matter of dragging the river.’

‘Oh God, you don’t think he’d do that?’

The Inspector shrugged his shoulders. The silence between them became intolerable to Nigel. He said, a little feverishly, ‘It’s just Phil’s last quixotic gesture. It must be. You know, I thought I saw a movement in the shrubbery. It must have been Phil. He heard you say that you were going to arrest Felix. He’s passionately devoted to Felix. No doubt he thought, by running away, to divert suspicion from him. That’s what was in his mind.’

Blount looked at him, shaking his head gravely.

‘I wish I could think that was so, Mr Strangeways. But it’s no good now.
I know that it was Phil who poisoned George Rattery
. The poor wee boy.’

Nigel opened his mouth to speak, but the Inspector went on, ‘You said yourself, the solution of this affair must lie somewhere in Mr Cairnes’ diary. I was reading it through again last night and I got a glimmering of
an
idea; what’s happened since proves it. I’ll take the clues in the order they came to my mind. First, Phil was awful upset by the way his father treated his mother: George Rattery used to bully her and knock her about; Phil complained to Mr Cairnes about it one time, but of course Mr Cairnes could not do anything. Now carry your mind to that dinner party he mentions in his diary. They were talking about the right to kill. Mr Cairnes says one is justified in killing a person who makes life miserable for everyone around him. And then, you remember, it’s written down in the diary, Phil had piped up with some question, and Mr Cairnes wrote in his diary – ‘We’d all forgotten he was there, I think. He’d only just been promoted to late dinner.’ We’ve all been forgetting that the wee boy was there, I’m afraid – all the time. I did not even take his fingerprints. Well now, think of the effect on an impressionable, neurotic child of that chance remark of Cairnes’ about getting rid of social pests. There was Phil, brooding about the way his father treated his mother, and then the man whom Phil admires most in the world says openly that one has a right to kill people who make life miserable for others. Remember Phil’s implicit confidence in Cairnes – and you know there’s nothing a boy won’t do if it seems to be sanctioned by someone he worships like that. And remember that he had appealed to Cairnes to do something about it, and his appeal had failed. You’ve said yourself, often enough, that the environment in which Phil was brought up was enough to make any
child
mentally unbalanced. Well, there’s your motive and your state of mind.’

‘General Shrivenham told me this morning that Phil’s grandfather – Ethel Rattery’s husband – died in a lunatic asylum,’ said Nigel softly, to himself.

‘There you are. It was in the blood. Uh-huh. Now for the means. We knew that the wee boy would be down at the garage often enough, and then there’s confirmation in Cairnes’ diary: he says there that George Rattery told him Phil used to go potting with his airgun at the rats on the rubbish dump. Nothing easier than for him to take away a quantity of the vermin-killer. There had been an unusually painful scene between George and Violet last week; Phil had seen his mother knocked down and tried to protect her. That scene must have finally made up the poor laddie’s mind for him – or turned his brain, whichever you like to call it.’

‘But you’re still up against the fantastic coincidence that Phil should have chosen the same day as Cairnes to murder George Rattery,’ protested Nigel.

‘Not so fantastic when you consider it was only a couple of days after this culminating scene between his father and mother. But it may not have been a coincidence either. The diary was hidden under the floorboards in Cairnes’ room. Now Phil was always in and out of that room; he did his lessons there, for one thing, and a loose floorboard is just what you might expect a wee boy to discover or to have known
of
already. He may have kept his own secret treasures there once.’

‘But surely, when Phil was so fond of Felix, the last thing he’d do would be to poison his father on the same day that Felix’s own attempt was made; and thus incriminate Felix so obviously.’

‘Ah, you’re being too subtle, Mr Strangeways. Remember, it’s a boy’s mind we’re dealing with. My theory is that, if it was not a coincidence, Phil discovered Cairnes’ diary, found out that Cairnes intended to try and drown George, and when his father returned safe and sound from the river, put the poison in the tonic himself. It would never occur to him that he was incriminating Felix, because he had no idea that the diary had also been found by George and was already in the hands of solicitors. I know there are difficulties about this. That’s why on the whole I’m inclined to believe the two murder attempts happening on the same day was a coincidence.’

‘Yes, that all sounds reasonable enough, I’m afraid.’

‘Now for some further points. After dinner on Saturday, when the poison had begun to work on Rattery, Lena Lawson goes into the dining room and notices the bottle of tonic on the table. She jumps to the conclusion that Felix is responsible for the poisoning and in a panic thinks only of getting rid of the bottle. She goes to throw it out of the window,
and she sees Phil’s face pressed against the pane
. What was he doing there? If he was innocent, but knew that
his
father had been taken ill, he’d surely have been making himself useful, running messages, fetching things?’

‘Knowing Phil’s type, I’d say he’d more likely have run away as far as he could, up to his own room perhaps, trying to blot the horrible scene out of his mind – running away from it, anyhow.’

‘I daresay you’re right. In any case, one wouldn’t expect to find him staring in at the dining-room window, unless he had put the poison in the bottle and wanted to make sure the room was empty before he came in to take the bottle away and hide it. It’d be natural for a wee boy, knowing he’s done something wrong, to try and hide the evidence of his guilt. Well then, he told you later where the bottle was hidden and climbed over the roof to get it.’

‘Why, if he’d poisoned it and hidden it to protect himself?’

‘Because he now knew that Lena had told you she’d handed it on to him. He couldn’t pretend now that he knew nothing about the bottle. What he could do was to destroy it. And he tried his best. He chucked it off the roof and, when he found that I’d collected up the fragments, he went for me like a little fury – you noticed how worked up he was about that. I thought for a moment he’d gone mad. I realise now, he
was
mad – he was mad already. The only thought in his poor, crazed little head was still to get rid of the bottle somehow or other. You see, all along we’ve been explaining his queer actions by his devotion to Felix
Cairnes
. It never occurred to us that it was himself he was trying to protect.’

Nigel sat back, fingering the bandage on his head. It reminded him of something.

‘How d’you square up Phil’s guilt with your belief that it was Felix who dented my skull last night?’

‘It wasn’t though. The wee boy did that for you. Listen, this is how I reconstruct it. He made up his mind to run away. He creeps downstairs after midnight, in the dark. Just as he gets to the bottom of the stairs, he hears the door of the writing room open. He knows there is someone between him and the front door by which he’d intended to leave the hotel. He knows, too, that whoever it is has just come out of the writing room will likely switch on the hall lights, and then he’ll be discovered. As he cowers close to the wall, his hand touches that putter which has been left leaning against it. He’s desperate and terrified – the poor laddie – in a trap. He takes up the putter and swings it blindly in the darkness, hitting out towards this invisible person who stands between him and escape. He hits you and you fall. Phil is horrified by what he’s done. He’s afraid to turn on the lights, afraid of the body that lies between him and the front door. He remembers the French windows in the dining room, and slinks out that way instead. It was his fingerprints on the French windows, we compared them with the prints he’d left in his bedroom.’

‘He was afraid of the body?’ said Nigel dreamily. ‘He ran away from it out of the hotel?’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing. Nothing. Yes, I’m sure that’s what he would have done. I shall always take up the cudgels for you in the future, if anyone says to me that Scotland Yard has no imagination. By the way, you must meet General Shrivenham some time – you might make him alter his opinion about the Scotch.’

‘The Scots, please.’

‘But seriously, Blount, your case is brilliantly worked out; it’s all theory though, isn’t it? You haven’t a scrap of material evidence against Phil.’

‘A scrap of paper,’ said the Inspector sombrely. ‘A wee scrap of paper. He left it for me in his room. A letter for me. A confession.’

He handed across to Nigel a sheet of lined paper torn out of an exercise book. Nigel read,

Dear Inspector Blount
,

this is to tell you it wasn’t Felix, it was me who put the poison in that medicine bottle. I hated Dad because he was cruel to Mummy. I’m going to run away where you can’t find me.

yours sincerely

Philip Rattery

‘The poor boy,’ muttered Nigel. ‘What a pitiable affair this is. God, what a set-up!’ He went on urgently, ‘Look here, Blount, you’ve got to find him. Quickly. I’m afraid of what may happen. Phil’s capable of anything.’

‘We’re doing all we can. Maybe, though, it’d be a better thing if we – e-eh – found him too late. He’d be sent to a home, you know: a mental home. I hate to think of it, Mr Strangeways.’

‘Never mind about that,’ said Nigel, looking with a strange intensity at Blount. ‘Find him. You’ve got to find him before anything happens.’

‘We’ll find him all right, trust me. I’m afraid there’s no doubt about that. He can’t get far away. Unless he’s gone by the river,’ Blount added with sad significance.

Five minutes later Nigel was back at the Angler’s Arms. At the door Felix Cairnes was awaiting him, his eyes dark with anxiety, unspoken questions trembling on his lips.

‘What have they—?’

‘Can we go up to your room?’ said Nigel quickly. ‘I’ve a lot to tell you, and it’s a bit too public here.’

Upstairs, in Felix’s room, Nigel sat down. His head had begun to ache again; for a moment the room swam before his eyes. Felix was standing by the window, looking out upon the gracious curves and shining reaches of the river upon which he and George Rattery had embarked. His body was tense. He felt an intolerable weight on his tongue and on his heart, preventing him from asking the question that had been growing within him all day.

‘Did you know that Phil had left a confession?’ asked Nigel gently. Felix spun round, his hands gripping the window sill behind him.

‘A confession that it was he who poisoned George Rattery.’

‘But it’s crazy! The boy must have gone mad,’ exclaimed Felix, in a wild, random kind of agitation. ‘He’d no more kill – look here, Blount’s not taking it seriously, is he?’

‘Blount has worked out an extraordinarily convincing case against Phil, I’m afraid, and this confession put the lid on it.’

‘Phil didn’t do it. He couldn’t have done it. I know he didn’t do it.’

‘So do I,’ said Nigel, in level tones.

Felix’s hand stopped short in the middle of a gesture. For a second he stared at Nigel uncomprehendingly.

Then he whispered:

‘You know? How d’you know?’

‘Because I’ve found out at last who really did do it. I shall need your help to fill in the detail of my theory. Then we can decide what’s to be done.’

‘Go on. Who was it? Go on, tell me, please.’

‘You remember that phrase of Cicero’s – it comes somewhere in the
De Officiis
, I think. “
In ipsa dubitatione facinus inest”?
– “The guilt is seen in the very hesitation.” I’m very sorry, Felix. You’re too good a chap to commit a successful murder. As Shrivenham said to me this morning, you’ve got too much conscience.’

‘Oh. I see.’ Felix swallowed hard, and dropped the words into the shocking silence that gaped between them. Then he tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been all
this
bother to you. It can’t be much fun for you, after all your efforts on my behalf, having to come to this conclusion. Well, I’m glad, in a way, that it’s over. I’m afraid Phil queered my pitch with that confession of his. I’d have had to tell the police. Why
did
he do it?’