Ngaio Marsh - Scales of Justice

“You dirty old man,” Alleyn said absently. “We’ll have to find out, you know.”

“ Crime passionnel ?”

“Again you never know. We’ll ring the Yard and ask them to look him up in the Navy List. They can find out when he was in Singapore and get a confidential report.”

“Say,” Fox speculated, “that he was sweet on her. Say they were engaged when he introduced her to the Colonel. Say he went off in his ship and then was retired from the navy and came home and found Kitty de Vere changed into the second Mrs. Cartarette. So he takes to the bottle and gets,” said Mr. Fox, “an idé fixe. ”

“So will you, if you go on speculating with such insatiable virtuosity. And what about his lumbago? Personally, I think he’s having a dim fling with Nurse Kettle.”

Fox looked put out.

“Very unsuitable,” he said.

“Here is Mr. Phinn’s spinney and here, I think, is our girlfriend of last night.”

Mrs. Thomasina Twitchett was, in fact, taking a stroll. When she saw them, she wafted her tail, blinked and sat down.

“Good morning, my dear,” said Alleyn.

He sat on his heels and extended his hand. Mrs. Twitchett did not advance upon it, but she broke into an extremely loud purring.

“You know,” Alleyn continued severely, “if you could do a little better than purrs and mews, I rather fancy you could give us exactly the information we need. You were in the bottom meadow last night, my dear, and I’ll be bound you were all eyes and ears.”

Mrs. Twitchett half closed her eyes, sniffed at his extended forefinger and began to lick it.

“Thinks you’re a kitten,” Fox said sardonically.

Alleyn in his turn sniffed at his finger and then lowered his face almost to the level of the cat’s. She saluted him with a brief dab of her nose.

“What a girl,” Fox said.

“She no longer smells of raw fish. Milk and a little cooked rabbit, I fancy. Do you remember where we met her last night?”

“Soon after we began to climb the hill on this side, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. We’ll have a look over the terrain when we get the chance. Come on.”

They climbed up through Mr. Phinn’s spinney and finally emerged on the lawn before Jacob’s Cottage. “Though if that’s a cottage,” Fox observed, “Buck House is a bungalow.”

“Case of inverted snobbism, I daresay. It’s a nice front, nevertheless. Might have been the dower house to Nunspardon at one time. Rum go, couple of unattached males living side-by-side in houses that are much too big for them.”

“I wonder how Mr. Phinn and the Commander hit it off.”

“I wouldn’t mind having a bet that they don’t. Look, here he comes.”

“Cripes!” Mr. Fox ejaculated. “What a menagerie!”

Mr. Phinn had, in fact, come out of his house accompanied by an escort of cats and Mrs. Twitchett’s three fat kittens.

“No more!” he was saying in his curious alto voice. “All gone! Go and catch micey, you lazy lot of furs.”

He set down the empty dish he had been carrying. Some object fell from his breast pocket and he replaced it in a hurry. Some of his cats pretended alarm and flounced off, the others merely stared at him. The three kittens, seeing their mother, galloped unsteadily towards her with stiff tails and a great deal of conversation. Mr. Phinn saw Alleyn and Fox. Staring at them, he clapped his hands like a mechanical toy that had not quite run down.

The tassel of his smoking cap had swung over his nose, but his sudden pallor undid its comic effect. The handle of the concealed object protruded from his breast pocket. He began to walk towards them, and his feline escort, with the exception of the Twitchetts, scattered before him.

“Good morning,” Mr. Phinn fluted thickly. He swept aside his tassel with a not quite steady hand and pulled up a dingy handkerchief, thus concealing the protruding handle. “To what beneficent constabular breeze do I owe this enchanting surprise? Detectives, emerging from a grove of trees!” he exclaimed and clasped his hands. “Like fauns in pursuit of some elusive hamadryad! Armed, I perceive,” he added with a malevolent glance at Commander Syce’s arrow, which Alleyn had retained by the simple expedient of absent-mindedly walking away with it.

“Good morning, Mr. Phinn,” Alleyn said. “I have been renewing my acquaintance with your charming cat.”

“Isn’t she sweet?” Mr. Phinn moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Such a devoted mama, you can’t think!”

Alleyn sat on his heels beside Mrs. Twitchett, who gently kicked away one of her too-greedy kittens. “Her fur’s in wonderful condition for a nursing mother,” he said, stroking it. “Do you give her anything special to eat?”

Mr. Phinn began to talk with the sickening extravagance of the feline-fanatic. “A balanced diet,” he explained in a high-pitched voice, “of her own choosing. Fissy on Mondays and Fridays. Steaky on Tuesdays. Livvy on Wednesdays. Cooked bun on Thursdays and Sundays. Embellished,” he added with a merciless smile, “by our own clever claws, with micey and birdie.”

“Fish only twice a week,” Alleyn mused, and Fox, suddenly feeling that something was expected of him, said, “Fancy!”

“She is looking forward to to-morrow,” Mr. Phinn said, “with the devoted acquiescence of a good Catholic, although, of course, theistically, she professes the mysteries of Old Nile.”

“You don’t occasionally catch her dinner for her in the Chyne?”

“When I am successful,” Mr. Phinn said, “we share.”

“Did you,” Alleyn asked, fatuously addressing himself to the cat, “did you have fresh fissy for your supper last night, my angel?” Mrs. Twitchett turned contemptuously to her kittens.

“No!” said Mr. Phinn in his natural voice.

“You made no other catch then, besides the fabulous Old ’Un?”

“No!”

“May we talk?”

Mr. Phinn, silent for once, led the way through a side door and down a passage into a sizable library.

Alleyn’s eye for other people’s houses unobtrusively explored the room. The Colonel’s study had been pleasant, civilized and not lacking in feminine graces. Commander Syce’s drawing-room was at once clean, orderly, desolate and entirely masculine. Mr. Phinn’s library was disorderly, dirty, neglected and ambiguous. It exhibited confused traces of Georgian grace, Victorian pomposity and Edwardian muddle. Cushions that had once been fashionably elaborate were now stained and tarnished. There were yards of dead canvas that had once been acceptable to Burlington House, including the portrait of a fragile-looking lady with a contradictory jaw that was vaguely familiar. There were rows and rows of “gift” books about cats, cheek-by-jowl with Edwardian novels which, if opened, would be found to contain illustrations of young women in dust coats and motoring veils making haughty little moues at gladiators in Norfolk jackets. But there were also one or two admirable chairs, an unmistakable Lyly and a lovely, though filthy, rug. And among the decrepit novels were books of distinction and authority. It was on Mr. Phinn’s shelves that Alleyn noticed an unexpected link with the Colonel. For here among a collection of books on angling he saw again The Scaly Breed by Maurice Cartarette. But what interested Alleyn perhaps more than all these items was a state of chaos that was to be observed on and near a very nice serpentine-fronted bureau. The choked drawers were half out, one indeed was on the floor, the top was covered with miscellaneous objects which, to a police-trained eye, had clearly been dragged out in handfuls, while the carpet nearby was littered with a further assortment. A burglar, taken by surprise, could not have left clearer evidence behind him.