Ngaio Marsh - Scales of Justice

“Are you a fisherman too, then, Mrs. Cartarette?” Alleyn asked.

“God forbid!” she uaid with feeling. “No, I tried to take a fish away from a cat last evening.” The others gaped at her.

“My dear Kitty,” Lady Lacklander said, “I suggest that you consider what you say.”

“Why?” Kitty countered, suddenly common and arrogant. “Why? It’s the truth. What are you driving at?” she added nervously. “What’s the matter with saying I’ve got fish on my skirt? Here,” she demanded of Alleyn, “what are they getting at?”

“My good girl—” Lady Lacklander began, but Alleyn cut in. “I’m sorry, Lady Lacklander, but Mrs. Cartarette’s perfectly right. There’s nothing the matter, I assure you, with speaking the truth.” Lady Lacklander shut her mouth with a snap. “Where did you meet your cat and fish, Mrs. Cartarette?”

“This side of the bridge,” Kitty muttered resentfully.

“Did you, now?” Alleyn said with relish.

“It looked a perfectly good trout to me, and I thought the cat had no business with it. I suppose,” Kitty went on, “it was one of old Occy Phinn’s swarm; the cat, I mean. Anyhow, I tried to get the trout away from it. It hung on like a fury. And then when I did jerk the trout away, it turned out to be half eaten on the other side, sort of. So I let the cat have it back,” Kitty said limply.

Alleyn said, “Did you notice any particular mark or scar on the trout?”

“Well, hardly. It was half eaten.”

“Yes, but on the part that was left?”

“I don’t think so. Here! What sort of mark?” Kitty demanded, beginning to look alarmed.

“It doesn’t matter. Really.”

“It was quite a nice trout. I wondered if Maurice had caught it, and then I thought old Occy Phinn must have hooked it and given it to the cat. He’s crazy enough on his cats to give them anything, isn’t he, George?”

“Good God, yes!” George ejaculated automatically, without looking at Kitty.

“It’s a possible explanation,” Alleyn said as if it didn’t much matter either way.

Mark came back from the house. “The clothes,” he said to Alleyn, “will be packed up and put in your car, which has arrived, by the way. I rang up Hammer and asked them to keep back the things for the cleaner.”

“Thank you so much,” Alleyn said. He turned to Lady Lacklander. “I know you’ll understand that in a case like this we have to fuss about and try to get as complete a picture as possible of the days, sometimes even the weeks and months, before the event. It generally turns out that ninety-nine per cent of the information is quite useless, and then everybody thinks how needlessly inquisitve and impertinent the police are. Sometimes, however, there is an apparently irrelevant detail that leads, perhaps by accident, to the truth.”

Lady Lacklander stared at him like a basilisk. She had a habit of blinking slowly, her rather white eyelids dropping conspicuously like shutters: a slightly reptilian habit that was disconcerting. She blinked twice in this manner at Alleyn and said, “What are you getting at, my dear Roderick? I hope you won’t finesse too elaborately. Pray tell us what you want.”

“Certainly. I want to know if, when I arrived, you were discussing Sir Harold Lacklander’s memoirs.”

He knew by their very stillness that he had scored. It struck him, not for the first time, that people who have been given a sudden fright tend to look alike: a sort of homogeneous glassiness overtakes them.

Lady Lacklander first recovered from whatever shock they had all received.

“In point of fact we were,” she said. “You must have extremely sharp ears.”

“I caught the name of my own publishers,” Alleyn said at once. “Brierley and Bentwood. An admirable firm. I wondered if they are to do the memoirs.”

“I’m glad you approve of them,” she said dryly. “I believe they are.”

“Colonel Cartarette was entrusted with the publication, wasn’t he?”

There was a fractional pause before Mark and Rose together said, “Yes.”

“I should think,” Alleyn said pleasantly, “that that would have been a delightful job.”

George, in a strangulated voice, said something about “responsibility” and suddenly offered Alleyn a drink.

“My good George,” his mother said impatiently, “Roderick is on duty and will have none of your sherry. Don’t be an ass.”

George blushed angrily and glanced, possibly for encouragement, at Kitty.

“Nevertheless,” Lady Lacklander said with a sort of grudging bonhomie, “you may as well sit down, Rory. One feels uncomfortable when you loom. There is, after all, a chair.”

“Thank you,” Alleyn said, taking it. “I don’t want to loom any more than I can help, you know, but you can’t expect me to be all smiles and prattle when you, as a group, close your ranks with such a deafening clank whenever I approach you.”

“Nonsense,” she rejoined briskly, but a dull colour actually appeared under her weathered skin, and for a moment there was a fleeting likeness to her son. Alleyn saw that Rose Cartarette was looking at him with a sort of anguished appeal and that Mark had taken her hand.

“Well,” Alleyn said cheerfully, “if it’s all nonsense, I can forget all about it and press on with the no doubt irrelevant details. About the autobiography, for instance. I’m glad Mr. Phinn is not with us at the moment because I want to ask you if Sir Harold gives a full account of young Phinn’s tragedy. He could scarcely, one imagines, avoid doing so, could he?”

Alleyn looked from one blankly staring face to another. “Or could he?” he added.

Lady Lacklander said, “I haven’t read my husband’s memoirs. Nor, I think, has anyone else, except Maurice.”

“Do you mean, Lady Lacklander, that you haven’t read them in their entirety, or that you haven’t read or heard a single word of them?”

“We would discuss them. Sometimes I could refresh his memory.”

“Did you discuss the affair of young Ludovic Phinn?”

“Never!” she said very loudly and firmly, and George made a certain noise in his throat.

Alleyn turned to Kitty and Rose.

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “Colonel Cartarette may have said something about the memoirs?”

“Not to me,” Kitty said and added, “Too pukka sahib.”

There was an embarrassed stirring among the others.

“Well,” Alleyn said, “I’m sorry to labour the point, but I should like to know, if you please, whether either Sir Harold Lacklander or Colonel Cartarette ever said anything to any of you about the Ludovic Phinn affair in connection with the memoirs.”

“Damned if I see what you’re getting at!” George began, to the dismay, Alleyn felt sure, of everybody who heard him. “Damned if I see how you make out my father’s memoirs can have anything to do with Maurice Cartarette’s murder. Sorry, Kitty. I beg pardon, Rose. But I mean to say!”

Alleyn said, “It’s eighteen years since young Ludovic Danberry-Phinn committted suicide, and a war has intervened. Many people will have forgotten his story. One among those who have remembered it… his father… must dread above all things any revival.” He leant forward in his chair, and as if he had given some kind of order or exercised some mesmeric influence on his audience, each member of it imitated this movement. George Lacklander was still empurpled, the others had turned very pale, but one expression was common to them all: they looked, all of them, extremely surprised. In Kitty and George and perhaps in Lady Lacklander, Alleyn thought he sensed a kind of relief. He raised his hand. “Unless, of course,” he said, “it has come about that in reviving the tragedy through the memoirs, young Phinn’s name will be cleared.”