Thou Shell of Death (8 page)

They submitted to the process. Then Bleakley said, ‘You get on with it now, George, and see if you can find a broken cufflink anywhere; the one on O’Brien’s right wrist was snapped in half—did it when he fell, I expect. You come with me, Bolter. I’ll want you to take down depositions.’

The superintendent jumped higher in Nigel’s estimation. He might be only a country dumpling, but he noticed things.

‘Now first we’ve got to try to find out when the snowfall began here,’ Bleakley was saying as they went over to the house. ‘It started about midnight with us. Do you know, by any chance, sir?’

‘Afraid I did the same as Arthur—fell asleep on the job,’ said Nigel bitterly.

Bleakley noticed the bitterness in his voice, and changed the subject tactfully. ‘A good lad, that George. His dad and mine worked on a farm down to Watchet.
Now
, sir, can you give me a line on the other people staying here, before I interview them?’

Nigel gave a succinct account of his fellow guests, omitting all conjectures and nuances. To keep out of earshot, he led Bleakley round by the kitchen garden and the stable yard, and by the time they had reached the back door he had finished his descriptions. He was so absorbed by them, in fact, that he did not notice the face that regarded him and Bleakley with a forbidding expression from the kitchen window. As they entered a harsh voice said, ‘I’ll thank ye to wipe your feet and noat come sullying ma clean passage.’ Mrs Grant stood in the kitchen door, her fingers folded tightly over her apron. Nigel began to giggle uncontrollably; the anticlimax was too much for his strained nerves. Mrs Grant fixed him with a dour regard. ‘This is noat the time for unseemly murrth, with a mon lying deid oot yonder.’

‘And who told you your master was dead?’ asked the superintendent smoothly.

The slightest flicker appeared in Mrs Grant’s granite-grey eyes. ‘Ah hairrd that woman screeching,’ she said.

‘What woman?’

‘Miss Thrale. It was an ill day when she set foot in this house, the painted hoor. I have always been in respaictable families before.’

‘Come, come, this is no way to talk with your master just dead,’ said Bleakley, genuinely shocked.

‘He broaght it on himself, consorrting with that hussy. It is the Lorrd’s judgement. The sinner shall perish before Him.’

‘Well,’ said Nigel, recovering himself, ‘we can discuss the theological aspect of the case later. What we’re concerned with at the moment is facts. Can you tell us, Mrs Grant, what time it began to snow last night?’

‘I dinna ken. I went to bed shairp at eleven and bolted the back door. It wasna snowing then.’

‘You saw, or heard no unauthorised persons about the place yesterday night, I take it?’ asked Bleakley.

‘That slut, Nellie, went home to the village when she’d washed up. After that, I hairrd nothing but Mr O’Brien’s friends rampaging and blaspheeming in the drawing room,’ said Mrs Grant severely. ‘And now I’ll thank ye to let me get on with my wurrk. I havna time for chattering with beesy-bodies.’

They retired, Bleakley frankly mopping his brow. The guests were in the dining room. Georgia was trying to persuade Lucilla, who was now clothed, though scarcely in her right mind, to drink some coffee. The rest were making spasmodic efforts to eat breakfast. Their heads all turned nervously when the door opened. The superintendent seemed rather nervous himself. He was not used to high life, his professional activities having been mainly confined so far to poachers, petty thieves, drunks and errant motorists. He twisted his moustache and said:

‘I will not trouble you for long, ladies and gentlemen. There seems no doubt that Mr O’Brien committed suicide. But I just want to get a few details settled up, so that there will be no trouble at the inquest. Now first, can any lady or gentleman tell me what time it began to snow here last night?’

There was a stir, a relaxation, as though everyone had been expecting some more sinister question. Starling and Knott-Sloman glanced at each other. Then the latter said:

‘Cavendish and I went to play billiards between eleven and half-past, I suppose it was. Starling came to look on. About five minutes after midnight—I remember because I heard the hall clock striking—Starling said, “Hallo, it’s beginning to snow.” He was standing at the window. Weren’t you, Starling?’

‘That seems quite satisfactory,’ said the superintendent. ‘Was it falling heavily, Mr Starling?’

‘A few flakes at first. It got heavier quite quickly, though.’

‘Did anyone happen to notice when it stopped?’

There was rather a long pause. Georgia, Nigel noticed, was looking uncertainly at her brother. Then she seemed to make up her mind about something, and said:

‘About quarter to two—I can’t tell you exactly, because my travelling clock has gone funny—I went into my brother’s room and asked for some sleeping draught. He’d packed it in his luggage. He was awake and got up to get it, and I noticed then that the flakes
were
coming down much thinner. It probably stopped soon after that.’

‘Thank you, Miss Cavendish. You were just going to bed then, Mr Cavendish?’

‘Oh, no. I went up soon after twelve. I couldn’t get to sleep, though.’

‘That is quite clear, I think. Now just one more question. The coroner will want to know when Mr O’Brien was last seen and whether he showed any signs of—of what he was going to do.’

After some discussion, the following points emerged. O’Brien had been with Lucilla and Georgia in the drawing room for a quarter of an hour after the Marlinworths had left. Then, about eleven-fifteen, the ladies had gone up to bed. O’Brien had looked in at the billiard players after this. He had stayed there for twenty minutes or so, and then said he was sleepy and going upstairs to bed.

‘So Mr O’Brien was last seen somewhere round about eleven forty-five,’ Bleakley summed up.

As to the other question, there was more difference of opinion. Cavendish and Knott-Sloman had noticed nothing about O’Brien, but that he seemed in exceptionally good form. Philip Starling thought he had looked ‘rather weird and worked-up’. Georgia agreed that he had been at the top of his form, but insisted that he had looked more than usually white and ill, and that she had felt some great strain under his gaiety. Lucilla, being asked her opinion, threatened to go off into another fit of hysterics, and cried out:
‘Why
do you torture me? Can’t you see that I—I—Ioved him?’ And then, as though shocked into sanity by the admission, she said, with unnatural calmness: ‘The hut? What was he doing in the hut?’

Nigel interposed quickly: ‘Well, I think that’s all we want, isn’t it, Bleakley?’

The superintendent took the cue, and after informing them that they might be required not to leave Chatcombe for a day or two, went out with Nigel and Bolter to the hut again. There they found the sergeant very pleased with himself. He had found the bit of broken cufflink lurking behind one of the legs of the big table. He had also discovered four distinct sets of fingerprints. One on the handle of the revolver, on the safe, and in other parts of the room, presumably O’Brien’s. There were no prints on the shoes. Bleakley had no doubt that two of the other sets would prove, on expert examination, to be Nigel’s and Bellamy’s. Whose was the fourth? Those prints on the shiny window-sill and the cigarette box on the bookcase? Nigel’s heart leaped up. Here was the X, the unknown whose existence he had yet to prove. Then, as suddenly, it sank again. Edward Cavendish had come into the hut with him; he had been standing by the bookcase and later had moved over to the window. Almost certainly they would be his. He suggested this to the superintendent. They went back to the house, detached Cavendish from his sister and Lucilla, and asked him to let them have his prints, for comparison with those on the window-sill and
cigarette
box. He made no demur, though he seemed nervous and flustered at the suggestion. Back in the hut again, Bleakley shook his head sadly at Nigel.

‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s no manner of good. They say dead men tell no tales, but it isn’t true here. The story is clear enough for a babby to see. I don’t like to think of a fine gentleman like Mr O’Brien taking his own life, but you can’t go against the evidence.’

‘The evidence,’ said Nigel slowly. ‘I believe I could make this dead man tell a very different tale, just on the evidence we’ve got so far.’

V

A TWISTED TALE

THE SUPERINTENDENT TWIRLED
his moustache indecisively. There was something compelling about this young Mr Strangeways’ quiet confidence. His army training had given him a possibly misplaced belief in the superior wisdom of what he would never have thought of calling ‘the officer class’. And what a case this would be if—Bleakley decided to listen. It was perhaps the wisest decision he ever made in his life. He sent George off post-haste to Taviston with his prints, and Bolter into the house to fetch some breakfast for Nigel.

Gesturing, now with an impaled sausage, now with a marmalade spoon, Nigel took up his parable. ‘I’m going to take as my hypothesis that O’Brien was murdered, and see how the evidence fits in with that. You can be the advocate for
felo-de-se
. Pull me up whenever I seem to misinterpret or contradict the facts. Between us we ought to thrash out the situation pretty thoroughly. Now first, the psychological evidence.’

Bleakley twirled his moustache importantly. He was gratified that Mr Strangeways took for granted his knowledge of the meaning of these scientific terms.

‘Anyone who knew O’Brien well would tell you that he was the last person to put an end to himself. Even my short acquaintance with him convinced me of that. He was a remarkable character—an eccentric one, you might say; but not unbalanced. He had the physical courage to shoot himself, I’ll admit; but he had equally the moral courage to refrain from shooting himself. I don’t believe he would have any qualms about taking life—we know that in the air he was quite ruthless, and I can imagine him even murdering a man in cold blood if he had sufficient incentive—for revenge, for instance. He must have had a terrific will-to-live for him to have come through all he did, and you are asking me to believe that a man with such survival power could just go quietly into a corner and shoot himself.’

‘It wasn’t so quietly, sir. Several of them said he seemed all worked up like and excitable last night.’

Nigel’s eyes glinted behind his spectacles and he waved a sausage forcefully in the air.

‘Ah, that’s just it. If O’Brien had been going to shoot himself, one would have expected him to be distrait, reserved, the stiff upper lip with an
occasional
outburst of semi-hysterical hilarity. But he wasn’t anything of the sort. He was uniformly gay. It was high spirits, not hysteria. The excitement beneath the surface, plus that fey look about him, are just what one would have expected from a man of almost reckless courage before going into battle. Which is exactly what he
was
doing. X’s ultimatum expired at midnight. Unfortunately
O’Brien
must have underestimated his adversary’s power this time.’

Bleakley scratched his knee. He did not like to admit that Nigel’s last reasonings had taken him right out of his depth. Then, with a desperate effort to get back to solid ground, he said:

‘That may be so, sir. But don’t you remember? The writer of those letters said something about how Mr O’Brien mustn’t balk him of his revenge by committing suicide. Now, that might’ve been just what Mr O’Brien did, see.’

‘That’s a bright idea of yours, Bleakley. It would have tickled O’Brien’s sense of humour to forestall the fire-breathing Mr X like that. But I don’t believe it. And, don’t you see, X probably put that bit about suicide in deliberately; he had laid his plans to commit murder and make it look like suicide; and this was just another detail to impress the idea of suicide on our innocent minds.’

‘Very ingenious, Mr Strangeways,’ said the superintendent obstinately; ‘but it’s all up in the air, in a manner of speaking. It’s not evidence, sir.’

Nigel jumped up, walked over to the safe, set his coffee cup on it, and brandished the spoon at Bleakley.

‘Very well, then, try to keep this one out of your wicket. If O’Brien intended to commit suicide, why, why, why did he ask me down here to help him repel the would-be murderer? If he wanted to be dead as
much
as all that, why go to such trouble to prevent someone doing the job for him?’

Bleakley was evidently impressed by this argument. ‘That’s a very pretty point, sir. I suppose, though, he might have intended to kill himself, yet not wanted the person who made those threats to escape unpunished.’

‘Unlikely, I think. And all that paraphernalia of carrying a revolver and pretending to be sleeping in the house—Oh, I hadn’t told you.’ Nigel explained O’Brien’s ruse. ‘Now why in the name of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms should he have bothered himself with such precautions against death if death was what he wanted?’

‘I don’t know about—er—about the gentlemen you mentioned,’ said Bleakley cautiously, ‘but it certainly don’t seem sense. Nor,’ he added, ‘don’t it seem sense for a man who was on the lookout for a murderer and not intending to be murdered to let someone walk up to him and put a gun right up against his waistcoat—and his own gun, too. Nor yet don’t it seem sense,’ his moustache bristled belligerently, ‘for a murderer to walk away from the hut through an inch of snow and leave no tracks. Why, sir, it’s soopernatural—that’s what it is, soopernatural.’

‘It must have been someone he could never have thought of suspecting,’ said Nigel slowly; ‘and yet it’s queer. The very reason he had this particular party down was that he suspected some or all of its members.’

‘What’s that, sir?’ The superintendent started upright in his chair.

‘Stupid of me. I keep on talking as though you knew all I know about it.’ Nigel mentioned the hints which O’Brien had let fall about his will and the aeroplane plans. ‘So you see, there is quite enough motive to be getting on with. And there may have been another motive that O’Brien didn’t reckon on at all. You remember what Mrs Grant said about Lucilla Thrale. Well, I happen to know for certain that she was O’Brien’s mistress—Lucilla, I mean, not Mrs Grant.’ Bleakley gave one explosive guffaw, then assumed his most ferociously official expression. ‘Lucilla tried to persuade O’Brien to let her come to his room last night: not unnaturally, he staved her off: ‘soft hands cling to the booted spur’, or however it goes. Now supposing O’Brien had cut out somebody else with the fair Lucilla. The somebody else would not be pleased. He might even carry his displeasure as far as murder. It has been done before. And there is a strong smell of personal hatred about those threatening letters.’