Ngaio Marsh - Scales of Justice

“How can I serve you?” asked Mr. Phinn. “A little refreshment, by the way? A glass of sherry? Does Tio Pepe recommend himself to your notice?”

“Not quite so early in the morning, thank you, and I’m afraid this is a duty call.”

“Indeed? How I wish I could be of some help. I have spent a perfectly wretched night — such of it as remained to me — fretting and speculating, you know. A murderer in the Vale! Really, if it wasn’t so dreadful, there would be a kind of grotesque humour in the thought. We are so very respectable in Swevenings. Not a ripple, one would have thought, on the surface of the Chyne!”

He flinched and made the sort of grimace that is induced by a sudden twinge of toothache.

“Would one not? What,” Alleyn asked, “about the Battle of the Old ’Un?”

Mr. Phinn was ready for him. He fluttered his fingers. “ Nil nisi, ” he said, with rather breathless airiness, “and all the rest of it, but really the Colonel was most exasperating as an angler. A monument of integrity in every other respect, I daresay, but as a fly-fisherman I am sorry to say there were some hideous lapses. It is an ethical paradox that so noble a sport should occasionally be wedded to such lamentable malpractices.”

“Such,” Alleyn suggested, “as casting under a bridge into your neighbour’s preserves?”

“I will defend my action before the Judgment Seat, and the ghost of the sublime Walton himself will thunder in my defence. It was entirely permissable.”

“Did you and the Colonel,” Alleyn said, “speak of anything else but this… ah… this ethical paradox?”

Mr. Phinn glared at him, opened his mouth, thought perhaps of Lady Lacklander and shut it again. Alleyn for his part remembered, with exasperation, the law on extra-judicial admissions. Lady Lacklander had told him there had been a further discussion between the two men but had refused to say what it was about. If Mr. Phinn should ever come to trial for the murder of Maurice Cartarette, or even if he should merely be called to give evidence against someone else, the use by Alleyn of the first of Lady Lacklander’s admissions and the concealment of the second would be held by a court of law to be improper. He decided to take a risk.

“We have been given to understand,” he said, “that there was, in fact, a further discussion.”

There was a long silence.

“Well, Mr. Phinn?”

“Well. I am waiting.”

“For what?”

“I believe it is known as the Usual Warning,” Mr. Phinn said.

“The police are only obliged to give the Usual Warning when they have decided to make an arrest.”

“And you have not yet arrived at this decision?”

“Not yet.”

“You, of course, have your information from the Lady Gargantua, the Mammoth Chatelaine, the Great, repeat Great, Lady of Nunspardon,” said Mr. Phinn, and then surprisingly turned pink. His gaze, oddly fixed, was directed past Alleyn’s elbow to some object behind him. It did not waver. “Not,” Mr. Phinn added, “that, in certain respects, her worth does not correspond by a rough computation with her avoirdupois. Did she divulge the nature of my further conversation with the Colonel?”

“No.”

“Then neither,” said Mr. Phinn, “shall I. At least, not yet. Not unless I am obliged to do so.”

The direction of his gaze had not shifted.

“Very well,” Alleyn said and turned away with an air of finality.

He had been standing with his back to a desk. Presiding over an incredibly heaped-up litter were two photographs in tarnished silver frames. One was of the lady of the portrait. The other was of a young man bearing a strong resemblance to her and was inscribed in a flowing hand: “Ludovic.”

It was at this photograph that Mr. Phinn had been staring.

Alleyn decided to press home what might or might not be an advantage and so did so with distaste. He had been in the police service for over twenty years. Under slow pressure his outward habit had toughened, but, like an ice cube that under warmth will yield its surface but retain its inward form, so his personality had kept its pattern intact. When an investigation led him, as this did, to take action that was distasteful to him, he imposed a discipline upon himself and went forward. It was a kind of abstinence, however, that prompted him to do so.

He said, looking at the photograph, “This is your son, sir, isn’t it?”

Mr. Phinn, in a voice that was quite unlike his usual emphatic alto, said, “My son, Ludovic.”

“I didn’t meet him, but I was in the Special Branch in 1937. I heard about his tragedy, of course.”

“He was a good boy,” Mr. Phinn said. “I think I may have spoiled him. I fear I may have done so.”

“One can’t tell about these things.”

“No. One can’t tell.”

“I don’t ask you to forgive me for speaking of him. In a case of homicide I’m afraid no holds are barred. We have discovered that Sir Harold Lacklander died with the name ‘Vic’ on his lips and full of concern about the publication of his own memoirs which he had entrusted to Colonel Cartarette. We know that your son was Sir Harold’s secretary during a crucial period of his administration in Zlomce and that Sir Harold could hardly avoid mention of the tragedy of your son’s death if he was to write anything like a definitive record of his own career.”

“You need go no further,” said Mr. Phinn with a wave of his hand. “I see very clearly what is in your mind.” He looked at Fox, whose notebook was in his palm. “Pray write openly, Inspector. Mr. Alleyn, you wonder, do you not, if I quarrelled with Colonel Cartarette because he proposed to make public, through Lacklander’s memoirs, the ruin of my boy. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“I wonder,” Alleyn said, “if the discussion, that Lady Lacklander overheard but doesn’t care to reveal, was about some such matter.”

Mr. Phinn suddenly beat his pudgy hands together, once. “If Lady L. does not care to tell you,” he announced, “then neither for the time being do I.”

“I wonder, too,” Alleyn continued, “if it wouldn’t be easy to misjudge completely your own motives and those of Lady Lacklander.”

“Ah,” Mr. Phinn said, with extraordinary complacency, “you are on dangerous ground indeed, my dear Alleyn. Peel away the layers of motive from the ethical onion and your eyes may well begin to water. It is no occupation, believe me, for a Chief Detective-Inspector.”

A faint smile played conceitedly about the corners of his mouth. Alleyn might have supposed him to have completely recovered his equanimity if it had not been for the slightest possible tic in the lower lid of his right eye and a movement of the fingers of one hand across the back of the other.

“I wonder,” Alleyn said, “if you’d mind showing us your fishing gear… the whole equipment as you took it down yesterday to the Chyne?”

“And why not?” Mr. Phinn rejoined. “But I demand,” he added loudly, “to know if you suspect me of this crime. Do you? Do you?”

“Come now,” Alleyn said, “you must know very well that you can’t in the same breath refuse to answer our questions and demand an answer to your own. If we may, we would like to see your fishing gear.”

Mr. Phinn stared at him. “It’s not here,” he said. “I’ll get it.”

“Fox will help you.”

Mr. Phinn looked as if he didn’t much relish this offer but appeared to think better of refusing it. He and Fox went out together. Alleyn moved over to the book-lined wall on his left and took down Maurice Cartarette’s work on The Scaly Breed. It was inscribed on the title page: “January 1930. For Viccy on his eighteenth birthday with good wishes for many happy castings,” and was signed by the author. The Colonel, Alleyn reflected, had evidently been on better terms with young Phinn than with his father.