Ngaio Marsh - Scales of Justice

“Sad,” said Mr. Fox.

“It was indeed.”

“Would you say, Mr. Alleyn, now, that this Mr. Phinn, Sr., was slightly round the bend?”

“Dotty?”

“Well — eccentric.”

“His behaviour in the watches of last night was certainly oddish. He was a frightened man, Fox, if I ever saw one. What do you think?”

“The opportunity was there,” Fox said, going straight to the first principle of police investigation.

“It was. And, by the way, Bailey’s done his dab-drill. The spectacles are Mr. Danberry-Phinn’s.”

“There now!” Fox ejaculated with the utmost satisfaction.

“It’s not conclusive, you know. He might have lost them down there earlier in the day. He’d still be very chary of owning to them.”

“Well…” Fox said sceptically.

“I quite agree. I’ve got my own idea about when and how they got there, which is this.”

He propounded his idea. Fox listened with raised brows.

“And as for opportunity, Fox,” Alleyn went on, “as far as we’ve got, it was also there for his wife, all three Lacklanders and, for a matter of that, Nurse Kettle herself.”

Fox opened his mouth, caught a derisive glint in his senior’s eye and shut it again.

“Of course,” Alleyn said, “we can’t exclude the tramps or even the dark-skinned stranger from the Far East. But there’s one item that emerged last night which I don’t think we can afford to disregard, Fox. It seems that Colonel Cartarette was entrusted by Sir Harold Lacklander, then on his deathbed, with the Lacklander memoirs. He was to supervise their publication.”

“Well, now,” Fox began, “I can’t say…”

“This item may be of no significance whatever,” Alleyn rejoined. “On the other hand, isn’t it just possible that it may be a link between the Lacklanders on the one hand and Mr. Octavius Phinn on the other, that link being provided by Colonel Cartarette with the memoirs in his hands.”

“I take it,” Fox said in his deliberate way, “that you’re wondering if there’s a full account of young Phinn’s offence in the memoirs and if his father’s got to know of it and made up his mind to stop publication.”

“It sounds hellish thin when you put it like that, doesn’t it? Where does such a theory land us? Cartarette goes down the hill at twenty past seven, sees Phinn poaching, and, overheard by Lady Lacklander, has a flaming row with him. They part company. Cartarette moves on to talk to Lady Lacklander, stays with her for ten minutes and then goes to the willow grove to fish. Lady L. returns home and Phinn comes back and murders Cartarette because Cartarette is going to publish old Lacklander’s memoirs to the discredit of young Phinn’s name. But Lady L. doesn’t say a word about this to me. She doesn’t say she heard them quarrel about the memoirs, although, if they did, there’s no reason that I can see why she wouldn’t. She merely says that they had a row about poaching and that Cartarette talked about this to her. She adds that he and she also discussed a private and domestic business which had nothing to do with Cartarette’s death. This, of course, is as it may be. Could the private and domestic business by any chance be anything to do with the publication of the memoirs? If so, why should she refuse to discuss it with me?”

“Have we any reason to think it might be about these memoirs, though?”

“No. I’m doing what I always say you shouldn’t do. I’m speculating. But it was clear, wasn’t it, that young Lacklander didn’t like the memoirs being mentioned. He shut up like a trap over them. They crop up, Br’er Fox. They occur. They link the Cartarettes with the Lacklanders, and they may well link Mr. Phinn with both. They provide, so far, the only, connecting theme in this group of apparently very conventional people.”

“I wouldn’t call her ladyship conventional,” Fox observed.

“She’s unconventional along orthodox lines, believe me. There’s a car pulling up. It’ll be Dr. Curtis. Let’s return to the bottom field and to the question of opportunity and evidence.”

But before he led the way out, he stood rubbing his nose and staring at his colleague.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “That old Lacklander died with what sounds like an uneasy conscience and the word ‘Vic’ on his lips.”

“Ah. Vic.”

“Yes. And Mark Lacklander referred to young Phinn as Viccy! Makes you fink, don’t it? Come on.”

By mid-summer morning light, Colonel Cartarette looked incongruous in the willow grove. His coverings had been taken away and there, close to the river’s brink, he was: curled up, empty of thought and motion, wearing the badge of violence upon his temple… a much photographed corpse. Bailey and Thompson had repeated the work of the previous night but without, Alleyn thought, a great deal of success. Water had flooded under duck boards, seeped up through earthy places soaked into Colonel Cartarette’s Harris tweeds and had collected in a pool in the palm of his right hand.

Dr. Curtis completed a superficial examination and stood up.

“That’s all I want here, Alleyn,” he said. “I’ve given Oliphant the contents of the pockets. A bundle of keys, tobacco, pipe, lighter. Fly case. Handkerchief. Pocket book with a few notes and a photograph of his daughter. That’s all. As for general appearances: rigor is well established and is, I think, about to go off. I understand you’ve found out that he was alive up to quarter past eight and that he was found dead at nine. I won’t get any closer in time than that.”

“The injuries?”

“I’d say, tentatively, two weapons, or possibly one weapon used in two ways. There’s a clean puncture with deep penetration, there’s a circular indentation with the puncture as its centre, and there’s been a heavy blow over the same area that has apparently caused extensive fracturing and a lot of extravasation. It might have been made by one of those stone-breaker’s hammers or even by a flat oval-shaped stone itself. I think it was the first injury he got. It would almost certainly have knocked him right out. Might have killed him. In any case it would have left him wide open to the second attack.”

Alleyn had moved round the body to the edge of the stream.

“And no prints?” he said looking at Bailey.

“There’s prints from the people that found him,” Bailey said, “clear enough. Man and woman. Overlapping and straight forward… walk towards, squat down, stand, walk away. And there’s his own heel marks, Mr. Alleyn, as you noticed last night. Half filled with surface drainage they were then, but you can see how he was, clear enough.”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “Squatting on a bit of soft ground. Facing the stream. He’d cut several handfuls of grass with his knife and was about to wrap up that trout. There’s the knife, there’s the grass in his hands, and there’s the trout! A whopper if ever there was one. Sergeant Oliphant says the Colonel himself hooked and lost him some days ago.”

He stooped and slipped an exploratory finger into the trout’s maw. “Ah, yes,” he said, “it’s still there. We’d better have a look at it.”

His long fingers were busy for a minute. Presently they emerged from the jaws of the Old ’Un with a broken cast. “That’s not a standard commercial fly,” he said. “It’s a beautiful home-made one. Scraps of red feather and gold cloth bound with bronze hair, and I think I’ve seen its mates in the Colonel’s study. Rose Cartarette tied the flies for her father, and I fancy this is the one he lost when he hooked the Old ’Un on the afternoon before Sir Harold Lacklander’s death.”

Alleyn looked at the Colonel’s broken head and blankly acquiescent face. “But you didn’t hook him this time,” he said, “and why in the world should you shout, at half past seven, that you wouldn’t be seen dead with him, and be found dead with him at nine?”