Ngaio Marsh - Scales of Justice

Mr. Phinn spun round with an inarticulate ejaculation.

She stood blinking in the sun, huge, without expression and very slightly tremulous.

“Roderick,” said Lady Lacklander, “I have come to confess.”

Lady Lacklander advanced slowly towards them.

“If that contraption of yours will support my weight, Octavius,” she said, “I’ll take it.”

They stood aside for her. Mr. Phinn suddenly began to gabble. “No, no, no! Not another word! I forbid it.”

She let herself down on a rustic seat.

“For God’s sake,” Mr. Phinn implored her frantically, “hold your tongue, Lady L.”

“Nonsense, Occy,” she rejoined, panting slightly. “Hold yours, my good fool.” She stared at him for a moment and then gave a sort of laugh.

“Good Lord, you think I did it myself, do you?”

“No, no, no. What a thing to say!”

She shifted her great torso and addressed herself to Alleyn. “I’m here, Roderick, virtually on behalf of my husband. The confession I have to offer is his.”

“At last,” Alleyn said. “Chapter 7.”

“Precisely. I’ve no idea how much you think you already know or how much you may have been told.”

“By me,” Mr. Phinn cried out, “nothing!”

“Humph!” she said. “Uncommon generous of you, Octavius.”

Mr. Phinn began to protest, threw up his hands and was silent.

“There are, however, other sources,” she went on. “I understand his wife has been kept posted.” She stared at Alleyn, who thought, “George has told Kitty Cartarette about Chapter 7 and Lady Lacklander has found out. She thinks Kitty has told me.” He said nothing.

“You may suppose, therefore,” Lady Lacklander continued, “that I am merely making a virtue of necessity.”

Alleyn bowed.

“It is not altogether that. To begin with, we are, as a family, under a certain obligation to you, Octavius.”

“Stop!” Mr. Phinn shouted. “Before you go on much further, before you utter —”

“Mr. Phinn,” Alleyn cut in, breaking about three vital items of the police code in one sentence, “if you don’t stop chattering, I shall take drastic steps to make you. Shut up, Mr. Phinn.”

“Yes, Occy,” Lady Lacklander said, “I couldn’t agree more. Either shut up or take yourself off, my dear fellow.” She lifted a tiny, fat hand, holding it aloft as if it was one of Mr. Phinn’s kittens. “Do me the favour,” she said, “of believing I have thought things over very carefully, and be quiet.”

While Mr. Phinn still hesitated, eyeing Alleyn and fingering his lips, Lady Lacklander made a brief comprehensive gesture with her short arms and said, “Roderick, my husband was a traitor.”

They made a strange group, sitting there on uncomfortable rustic benches. Fox took unobtrusive notes, Mr. Phinn held his head in his hands, Lady Lacklander, immobile behind the great façade of her fat, talked and talked. Cats came and went, gracefully indifferent to the human situation.

“That,” Lady Lacklander said, “is what you will find in Chapter 7.” She broke off and, after a moment, said, “This is not going to be easy and I’ve no wish to make a fool of myself. Will you forgive me for a moment?”

“Of course,” Alleyn said, and they waited while Lady Lacklander, staring before her, beat her puff-ball palms on her knees and got her mouth under control. “That’s better,” she said at last. “I can manage now.” And she went on steadily. “At the time of the Zlomce incident my husband was in secret negotiation with a group of Prussian fascists. The top group: the men about Hitler. They looked upon him, it appears, as their trump card: a British diplomat whose name—” her voice creaked and steadied—“was above reproach in his own country. He was absolutely and traitorously committed to the Nazi programme.” Alleyn saw that her eyes were bitter with tears. “They never found that out at your M.I.5., Roderick, did they?”

“No.”

“And yet this morning I thought that perhaps you knew.”

“I wondered. That was all.”

“So she didn’t say anything.”

“She?”

“Maurice’s wife. Kitty.”

“No.”

“You never know,” she muttered, “with that sort of people what they may do.”

“Nor,” he said, “with other sorts either, it seems.”

A dark unlovely flush flooded her face.

“The extraordinary thing,” Mr. Phinn said suddenly, “is why. Why did Lacklander do it?”

“The Herrenvolk heresy?” Alleyn suggested. “An aristocratic Anglo-German alliance as the only alternative to war and communism and the only hope for the survival of his own class? It was a popular heresy at that time. He wasn’t alone. No doubt he was promised great things.”

“You don’t spare him,” Lady Lacklander said under her breath.

“How can I? In the new Chapter 7, I imagine, he doesn’t spare himself.”

“He repented bitterly. His remorse was frightful.”

“Yes,” Mr. Phinn said. “That is clear enough.”

“Ah, yes!” she cried out. “Ah, yes, Occy, yes. And most of all for the terrible injury he did your boy — most of all for that.”

“The injury?” Alleyn repeated, cutting short an attempt on Mr. Phinn’s part to intervene. “I’m sorry, Mr. Phinn. We must have it.”

Lady Lacklander said, “Why do you try to stop me, Occy? You’ve read it. You must want to shout it from the roof-tops.”

Alleyn said, “Does Sir Harold exonerate Ludovic Phinn?”

“Of everything but carelessness.”

“I see.”

Lady Lacklander put her little fat hands over her face. It was a gesture so out of key with the general tenor of her behaviour that it was as shocking in its way as a bout of hysteria.

Alleyn said, “I think I understand. In the business of the railway concessions in Zlomce, was Sir Harold, while apparently acting in accordance with his instructions from the British Government, about to allow the German interest to get control?”

He saw that he was right and went on, “And at the most delicate stage of these negotiations, at the very moment where he desired above all things that no breath of suspicion should be aroused, his private secretary goes out on a Central European bender and lets a German agent get hold of the contents of the vital cable which Sir Harold had left him to decode. Sir Harold is informed by his own government of the leakage. He is obliged to put up a terrific show of ambassadorial rage. He has no alternative but to send for young Phinn. He accuses him of such things and threatens him with such disastrous exposures, such disgrace and ruin, that the boy goes out and puts an end to it all. Was it like that?”

He looked from one to the other.

“It was like that,” Lady Lacklander said. She raised her voice as if she repeated some intolerable lesson. “My husband writes that he drove Viccy Phinn to his death as surely as if he had killed him with his own hands. He was instructed to do so by his Nazi masters. It was then that he began to understand what he had done and to what frightful lengths his German associates could drive him. I knew, at that time, he was wretchedly unhappy, but put it down to the shock of Viccy’s death and — as I, of course, thought — treachery. But the treachery, Occy, was ours, and your Viccy was only a foolish and tragically careless boy.” She looked at Mr. Phinn and frowned. “Yesterday,” she said, “after your row with Maurice over the trout, he came to me and told me he’d left a copy of the amended Chapter 7 at your house. Why haven’t you produced it, Occy? Why just now did you try to stop me? Was it because—”

“Dear me, no,” Mr. Phinn said very quietly, “not from any high-flown scruples, I assure you. It was, if you will believe me, in deference to my boy’s wishes. Before he killed himself, Viccy wrote to his mother and to me. He begged us to believe him innocent. He also begged us most solemnly, whatever the future might hold, never to take any action that might injure Sir Harold Lacklander. You may not have noticed, my dear Lady L., that my foolish boy hero-worshipped your husband. We decided to respect his wishes.”