Ngaio Marsh - Scales of Justice

“You’re a wicked woman,” Nurse Kettle said. “I forbid you to talk like this. Sir George may have been silly and infatuated. I daresay you’ve got what it takes, as they say, and he’s a widower and I always say there’s a trying time for gentlemen just as there is — but that’s by the way. What I mean, if he’s been silly, it’s you that’s led him on,” Nurse Kettle said, falling back on the inexorable precepts of her kind. “You caught our dear Colonel and not content with that, you set your cap at poor Sir George. You don’t mind who you upset or how unhappy you make other people. I know your sort. You’re no good. You’re no good at all. I shouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t responsible for what’s happened. Not a scrap surprised.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Kitty whispered. She curled back, in her chair and staring at Nurse Kettle, she said, “You with your poor Sir George! Do you know what I think about your poor Sir George? I think he murdered your poor dear Colonel, Miss Kettle.”

Nurse Kettle sprang to her feet. The wrought-iron chair rocked against the table. There was a clatter of china and a jug of milk overturned into Kitty Cartarette’s lap.

“How dare you!” Nurse Kettle cried out. “Wicked! Wicked! Wicked !” She heard herself grow shrill and in the very heat of her passion she remembered an important item in her code: Never Raise the Voice. So although she would have found it less difficult to scream like a train, she did contrive to speak quietly. Strangely commonplace phrases emerged, and Kitty, slant-eyed, listened to them. “I would advise you,” Nurse Kettle quavered, “to choose your words. People can get into serious trouble passing remarks like that.” She achieved an appalling little laugh. “Murdered the Colonel!” she said, and her voice wobbled desperately. “The idea! If it wasn’t so dreadful, it’d be funny. With what, may I ask? And how?”

Kitty, too, had risen, and milk dribbled from her ruined skirt to the terrace. She was beside herself with rage.

“How?” she stammered. “I’ll tell you how and I’ll tell you with what. With a golf-club and his mother’s shooting-stick. That’s what. Just like a golf ball it was. Bald and shining. Easy to hit. Or an egg. Easy—”

Kitty drew in her breath noisily. Her gaze was fixed, not on Nurse Kettle, but beyond Nurse Kettle’s left shoulder. Her face was stretched and stamped with terror. It was as if she had laid back her ears. She was looking down the garden towards the spinney.

Nurse Kettle turned.

The afternoon was far advanced and the men who had come up through the spinney cast long shadows across the lawn, reaching almost to Kitty herself. For a moment she and Alleyn. looked at each other and then he came forward. In his right hand he carried a pair of very small old-fashioned shoes: brogues with spikes in the heels.

“Mrs. Cartarette,” Alleyn said, “I am going to ask you if when you played golf with Sir George Lacklander, he lent you his mother’s shoes. Before you answer me, I must warn you—”

Nurse Kettle didn’t hear the Usual Warning. She was looking at Kitty Cartarette, in whose face she saw guilt itself. Before this dreadful symptom her own indignation faltered and was replaced, as it were professionally, by a composed, reluctant and utterly useless compassion.

“George,” Lady Lacklander said to her son, “we shall, if you please, get this thing straightened out. There must be no reservations before Mark or—” she waved her fat hand at a singularly still figure in a distant chair—“or Octavius. Everything will come out later on. We may as well know where we are now, among ourselves. There must be no more evasions.”

George looked up and muttered, “Very well, Mama.”

“I knew, of course,” his mother went on, “that you were having one of your elephantine flirtations with this wretched, unhappy creature. I was afraid that you had been fool enough to tell her about your father’s memoirs and all the fuss over Chapter 7. What I must know, now, is how far your affair with her may be said to have influenced her in what she did.”

“My God!” George said. “I don’t know.”

“Did she hope to marry you, George? Did you say things like: ‘If only you were free,’ to her?”

“Yes,” George said, “I did.” He looked miserably at his mother and added, “You see, she wasn’t. So it didn’t seem to matter.”

Lady Lacklander snorted but not with her usual brio. “And the memoirs? What did you say to her about them?”

“I just told her about that damned Chapter 7. I just said that if Maurice consulted her, I hoped she’d sort of weigh in on our side. And I — when that was no use — I–I said — that if he did publish, you know, it’d make things so awkward between the families that we — well—”

“All right. I see. Go on.”

“She knew he had the copy of Chapter 7 when he went out. She told me that — afterwards — this morning. She said she couldn’t ask the police about it, but she knew he’d taken it.”

Lady Lacklander moved slightly. Mr. Phinn made a noise in his throat.

“Well, Occy?” she said.

Mr. Phinn, summoned by telephone and strangely acquiescent, said, “My dear Lady L., I can only repeat what I’ve already told you; had you all relied on my discretion, as I must acknowledge Cartarette did, there would have been no cause for anxiety on any of your parts over Chapter 7.”

“You’ve behaved very handsomely, Occy.”

“No, no,” he said. “Believe me, no.”

“Yes, you have. You put us to shame. Go on, George.”

“I don’t know that there’s anything more. Except—”

“Answer me this, George. Did you suspect her?”

George put his great elderly hand across his eyes and said, “I don’t know, Mama. Not at once. Not last night. But this morning. She came by herself, you know. Mark called for Rose. I came downstairs and found her in the hall. It seemed queer. As if she’d been doing something odd.”

“From what Rory tells us, she’d been putting my shoes, that you’d lent her without my leave, in the downstairs cloakroom,” Lady Lacklander said grimly.

“I am completely at a loss,” Mr. Phinn said suddenly.

“Naturally you are, Occy.” Lady Lacklander told him about the shoes. “She felt, of course, that she had to get rid of them. They’re the ones I wear for sketching when I haven’t got a bad toe, and my poor fool of a maid packed them up with the other things. Go on, George.”

“Later on, after Alleyn had gone and you went indoors, I talked to her. She was sort of different,” said poor George, “Well, damned hard. Sort of almost suggesting — well, I mean, it wasn’t exactly the thing.”

“I wish you would contrive to be more articulate. She suggested that it wouldn’t be long before you’d pay your addresses?”

“Er — er—”

“And then?”

“I suppose I looked a bit taken aback. I don’t know what I said. And then — it really was pretty frightful — she sort of began, not exactly hinting, but — well—”

“Hinting,” Lady Lacklander said, “will do.”

“—that if the police found Chapter 7, they’d begin to think that I — that we — that—”

“Yes, George. We understand. Motive.”

“It really was frightful. I said I thought it would be better if we didn’t sort of meet much. It was just that I suddenly felt I couldn’t. Only that, I assure you, Mama. I assure you, Octavius.”

“Yes, yes,” they said. “All right, George.”

“And then, when I said that, she suddenly looked—” George said this with an unexpected flash—“like a snake.”