Thou Shell of Death (21 page)

‘When he knocked off work he came and sat under the lean-to tent I had made against the side of the car, and asked me all sorts of questions about myself. He wanted to take my mind off the—er—recent events; and, besides, he was interested in everything—that was a part of his greatness. By nightfall that day he knew the whole story of my life. I hadn’t realised before how interesting my life had been. He was the sort of person who makes you supremely interesting to yourself—only a great man can do that, or your lover, and he wasn’t my lover yet—not by long chalks. Well, after the subject of me had been exhausted, he got me on to my family. I told him all about my parents and about Edward. Our parents died when I was quite young and there were only Edward and me, so I’ve always been rather soppy about him. Fergus saw that at once—he had extraordinarily keen intuition, and he made me tell him all about Edward, too. Edward used to go over to Ireland every summer before the war. We had relations there, so of course I made the usual dumb remark about whether Fergus had met him over there, as though Ireland was a small village or an educational conference or something. Fergus asked me where he’d stayed, and I told him it was at Meynart House, in County Wexford, and he said he knew that part of the country quite well.

‘Then he said something about how lonely I should feel if my brother got married, and how I ought
to
get married myself anyway. And I told him that Edward was a confirmed bachelor by now, and how I had an idea he had fallen in love with some girl over in Ireland and she had chucked him. Fergus was very interested in that, but I couldn’t tell him much, because it was the one thing that Edward had never opened up to me about. He said he would like to meet Edward some time, and I said he certainly should if we ever got out of this blasted desert. Then I asked him about himself. He told me a lot of Münchausen sort of stories about his adventures in the war and after; at least, if anyone else had told them they would have been pure Münchausen, but I had heard enough about him to know that they were probably true. Founded on fact, anyway—you know how an Irishman will garnish a true story with any number of picturesque falsehoods, just to make it more appetising. Fergus was a true artist in that. I asked him about his life before the war, but he rather put up the shutters over that. He did say, though, that he’d never known who his parents were and that he used to work on the land. And that’s all I’ve ever found out about the prewar O’Brien. The next day Fergus got down to the undercarriage again. We managed to jack the plane up a bit, and he used pieces of the car and God knows what, and finally he’d rigged up a sort of Heath Robinson monstrosity that he said would get us off the ground all right. He was an absolute genius with his hands. I pointed out that it would fall to pieces as soon as it hit a bump, which meant before it had
gone
five yards, but he said we were going to make a runway. So the next day and most of the one after that we spent—I was all right by then physically—levelling out a hundred yards of those Godforsaken tussocks with spades and piling the stuff into the rain-channels. We got off the ground, as it happened; but we hit something hardish at the far end, and that must have weakened the makeshift undercarriage, because when we landed at Cairo—Fergus insisted on going there instead of Khartoum, because he said the nursing homes there were better—we had a crack-up. Fergus got laid out properly and I was feeling I could do with a week in bed; so in the end we both went to the nursing home. Oh, I forgot to tell you that before we left Fergus pinned to the car a notice with
Per Ardua Ad Astra
written on one side, and a most offensive message to the Khartoum authorities on the other. The search party found it the next day. It caused some stir in official circles, I heard later.’

‘Well—er—thank you very much,’ said Nigel after a long pause. One comment seemed just about as adequate as any other.

‘Not at all. A pleasure,’ Georgia replied with derisive banality. Then: ‘No, but it was, really. You must be very sympathetic. I’ve never told anyone else all that. I feel happier now than I’ve felt since Fergus was killed.’ Her voice spoke the phrase with a pathetic, careful, tentative control, like a convalescent taking his first walk. Nigel, staring in front of him, was seeing not a clump of wet beeches, but a young woman in the
desert
shooting her crazed companion with no more nor less compunction than she would have shot a mad dog: it was her life or his. Had it, in some mysterious way, been a question of her life or O’Brien’s, too? He was seeing the same young woman toying with her dose of prussic acid. ‘Nice quick stuff.’ Jolly. Ripping. Makes the party go. He spoke with an unnatural harshness that quite startled Georgia.

‘You did say prussic acid?’

‘When? Oh, yes. Why?’

‘Just a coincidence,’ answered Nigel unhappily. ‘That’s what Knott-Sloman was poisoned with.’

The so hardly gleaned happiness of the last hour was dashed from Georgia’s face at a stroke. Nigel felt as if he had hit her on a wound just beginning to heal. However, he had to go on.

‘What do you do with the stuff when you’re not travelling?’

‘I keep it locked up at home. Sometimes I pour it away.’

‘Should there be any at your home just now?’

Georgia hesitated. Then she whispered, as though in doubt, ‘Yes, there should be.’

‘I simply hate asking you all this. But, as you know, a poison of that sort can only be obtained legally through a doctor. I assume that you obtained it legally, and therefore it is only a matter of time before possession of it is traced to you. The police are bound to ask you about it before long; and it would simplify things for you and everyone else if you told them
about
it at once and gave them permission to fetch the poison from where you keep it—just to prove that it’s not been used, I mean.’

‘No, no! I couldn’t—I daren’t do that,’ she exclaimed.

‘“Daren’t”?’

‘No. You see,’ she explained hurriedly, ‘last time I got it from a chemist—a great friend of mine. I forgot it till the last minute. He gave it to me without a doctor’s prescription. It would get him into frightful trouble.’

‘How many people knew that you had—have the stuff?’

‘Most of my friends, I expect. But you’re wasting time. No one on earth knows where I keep it in the house.’ Georgia looked unbearably overstrained and wan. Nigel couldn’t play the inquisitor any longer. He said:

‘Please believe me. I’ve learnt that you are capable of shooting a man, and that you keep the same sort of poison that Knott-Sloman was killed with. But I believe still less than before that you killed him or O’Brien.’

Georgia gave him a grateful smile, but her eyes were still preoccupied with some problem beyond the reach of any amateur detective’s gallantry. Nigel felt a spasm of bitterness and disappointment. He had put himself out of the running as a detector of this crime by irrationally believing everything that Georgia told him; yet his belief in her didn’t seem of any use to her at all. She divined this, and put her hand on his arm.

‘It does make the hell of a lot of difference, your being so good to me. But there are things I simply can’t ask you to help me about. Now, what else do you want to know?’

‘When did O’Brien first take up with Lucilla?’

‘After he’d returned to England from Cairo early this year, as far as I know. He met her in our house. She was a flame of Edward’s then.’

‘Why did he take up with her, do you think, really? She’s not his sort, surely?’

‘Well, he was a man, and Lucilla is very decidedly a woman. But I felt he was only amusing himself with her. He obviously had no tenderness for her. He was queer with women, though. Sometimes,’ she added in a low voice, ‘I felt that he didn’t care even for me—not wholeheartedly, I mean. There was always a part of him elsewhere: it made him seem just a little inhuman, even to me. A demon lover. It sounds fantastic, but he was possessed sometimes. Something deeper than I could reach seemed to be driving him. The Greeks would have thought that the Eumenides were after him, I dare say.’

‘How did Knott-Sloman come into the picture? I should have thought he’d be the last person O’Brien would have any use for.’

‘Well, Lucilla was a sort of high-class decoy for his roadhouse. She’d taken Edward there a good deal, and one day she mentioned it to Fergus. Told him Knott-Sloman was running it. Fergus said he’d like to go and have a look at one of these latest blisters on
the
face of civilisation. They went there once or twice this summer. But I was certainly rather surprised to find Knott-Sloman down here.’

‘You don’t happen to know where O’Brien got his money from, do you? He told me he was a rich man.’

‘That’s funny. I asked him once. He said he’d got it by blackmailing an Indian maharajah. I expect it was one of his usual tales, with a nucleus of truth in the centre. He was in India after the war, and he probably did some potentate a service. They’re stiff with gold and wouldn’t think twice about giving Fergus a few chestfuls of it. He was careful about money, too—as careful about it as he was reckless of his own life. An odd trait.’

‘There’s only one other thing I want to ask now. Do you think your brother knew that O’Brien was going to give up Lucilla?’ Nigel caught a glimpse of the expression on Georgia’s face and added hastily: ‘All right. I take that question back.’

‘Do you mind if we go back to the house now?’ Georgia’s voice was small and shaking a little. ‘I—my feet are getting so awfully wet.’

Nigel took her arm. ‘Very well, my dear. You know, I don’t believe you’re tough at all,’ he said.

Georgia bit her trembling lip. She tried to say something. Then Nigel found her sobbing in his arms and himself whispering over her rain-wet hair:

‘This case seems to have got quite out of my control now.’

XII

TALES FROM THE PAST

THAT WAS NOT
strictly true, Nigel said to himself later, reviewing recent events in the comparatively unemotional atmosphere of his bedroom. ‘It’s not that the case is out of my control so much as that I’ve got to shift my grip on it. I am now, I suppose, what they call an interested party. Not that Georgia’s breakdown can mean much, as far as she is concerned. The trouble is that it seems to mean the hell of a lot to me. Oh, my aunt! What an impossible detective I am, to go falling in love with my chief suspect. Or have I fallen in love with her? A question teeming with human interest; but we shall have to leave analysis till later. The point at the moment is that Georgia has to be kept out of Blount’s claws. Funny thing, I hadn’t realised before, but I don’t think I really care for Blount. It must be his bald head. But it isn’t Georgia only. There’s that infernal brother of hers. She’d be heartbroken if anything happened to him. And if one thing is clear in this case, it is that she’s deadly afraid he did the murders. She’s been giving herself away over that from the very beginning. The way she looked at him
in
the hut that first morning; and pretending to have heard a thump overhead yesterday evening, when Edward had said he was in the morning room, so as to give him an alibi over Knott-Sloman; and letting it be known at once that she expected to benefit under the will, thus drawing suspicion off her brother and on to herself. Does she know something? Or does she just suspect?

‘Well, that’s an academic point. I’ve got to clear her brother, too. But that only leaves Lucilla. I can’t go trying to pin everything on her, just because I don’t want Georgia to be hurt. Not that there isn’t a pretty good case against Lucilla. Still, I don’t want to take part in a general
sauve-qui-peut
. It is not, now that I come to think of it, strictly accurate to say that Georgia has a face like a monkey—a damned attractive monkey, anyway. No, not a monkey at all. To hell with monkeys. They don’t have noses that tilt agreeably upwards, or eyes that—Nigel’s unprofessional rhapsodies were cut short by the entrance of Inspector Blount. His eyes sparkled briskly behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, and even his bald head seemed to give off a complacent glow—the ruddy bloodhound, thought Nigel with gross injustice.

‘I saw you went for a walk with Miss Cavendish. Get anything out of her?’ said Inspector Blount.

‘Nothing relevant,’ answered Nigel coldly. ‘We were talking about O’Brien most of the time.’

Blount cocked an inquisitive—and, to Nigel’s eyes, distinctly offensive—glance over his horn-rims.

‘I’ve been at Mrs Grant again. She swears black and blue that Bellamy was about the place till two-thirty on the day of the attack, so that lets Mr Starling out.’

‘It lets him out over the Bellamy incident,’ said Nigel grumpily.

‘Uh-huh. I’ve also had a very interesting talk with Edward Cavendish. I made it pretty clear that he was in an awkward position, and it would be advisable for him to explain certain things as soon as possible. I hinted at the motives he might have had for both crimes, and so on. He blustered for a bit. Then he caved in. Said, very reluctantly, that the reason he had been so upset and nervous lately was that he was afraid his sister might know more about the crimes than he liked to admit to himself.’

‘Oh, he said that, did he?’ exclaimed Nigel belligerently.

‘Uh-huh. He said something about an incident that had been hushed up: Miss Cavendish shooting some relation of hers out in Africa—in self-defence, she had claimed. He also said that he had been most seriously disturbed about it all when he heard that Knott-Sloman had been poisoned, because he knew that his sister had some poison in her possession. I asked him what kind of poison, and he said prussic acid. I asked him what motive his sister could have had for killing a man she loved and another man who was a comparative stranger. At that point he stiffened up again. Said he had never meant to suggest that his
sister
had done the murders, but was just afraid that the discovery of certain facts about her by the police might lead them to connect her with the crimes. As to motive, he said, not too convincingly, it was quite ridiculous to suppose she could have had any reason for killing O’Brien and Knott-Sloman; and, as the police had been so fertile in suggesting possible motives for himself, no doubt they could find an equal number for Georgia Cavendish without his assistance.’