Ngaio Marsh - Scales of Justice

“And you, my poor boy,” his mother added, “looked, no doubt, like the proverbial rabbit.”

“I feel I’ve behaved like one, anyway,” George rejoined with a unique touch of humour.

“You’ve behaved very badly, of course,” his mother said without rancour. “You’ve completely muddled your values. Just like poor Maurice himself, only he went still further. You led a completely unscrupulous trollop to suppose that if she was a widow, you’d marry her. You would certainly have bored her even more than poor Maurice, but Occy will forgive me if I suggest that your title and your money and Nunspardon offered sufficient compensation. You may, on second thoughts, even have attracted her, George,” his mother added. “I mustn’t, I suppose, underestimate your simple charms.” She contemplated her agonized son for a few minutes and then said, “It all comes to this, and I said as much to Kettle a few days ago: we can’t afford to behave shabbily, George. We’ve got to stick to our own standards, such as they are, and we daren’t muddle our values. Let’s hope Mark and Rose between them will pick up the pieces.” She turned to Mr. Phinn. “If any good has come out of this dreadful affair, Occy,” she said, “it is this. You have crossed the Chyne after I don’t know how many years and paid a visit to Nunspardon. God knows we have no right to expect it. We can’t make amends, Occy. We can’t pretend to try. And there it is. It’s over, as they say nowadays, to you.” She held out her hand and Mr. Phinn, after a moment’s hesitation, came forward to take it.

“You see, Oliphant,” Alleyn said with his customary air of diffidence, “at the outset it tied up with what all of you told me about the Colonel himself. He was an unusually punctilious man. ‘Oddly formal,’ the Chief Constable said, ‘and devilishly polite, especially with people he didn’t like or had fallen out with.’ He had fallen out with the Lacklanders. One couldn’t imagine him squatting on his haunches and going on with his job if Lacklander or his mother turned up in the punt. Or old Phinn, with whom he’d had a flaring row. Then, as you and Gripper pointed out, the first injury had been the sort of blow that is struck by a quarryman on a peg projecting from a cliff-face at knee level, or by an underhand service. Or, you might have added, by a golfer. It seemed likely, too, that the murderer knew the habit of the punt and the counter-current of the Chyne and the fact that where the punt came to rest in the willow-grove bay it was completely masked by trees. You will remember that we found one of Mrs. Cartarette’s distinctive yellow hairpins in the punt in close association with a number of cigarette butts, some with lipstick and some not.”

“Ah,” Sergeant Oliphant said. “Dalliance, no doubt.”

“No doubt. When I floated down the stream into the little bay and saw how the daisy heads had been cut off and where they lay, I began to see, also, a figure in the punt idly swinging a club: a figure so familiar to the Colonel that after an upward glance and a word of greeting, he went on cutting grass for his fish. Perhaps, urged by George Lacklander, she asked her husband to suppress the alternative version to Chapter 7 and perhaps he refused. Perhaps Lacklander, in his infatuation, had told her that if she was free, he’d marry her. Perhaps anger and frustration flooded suddenly up to her savage little brain and down her arms into her hands. There was that bald head, like an immense exaggeration of the golf balls she had swiped at under Lacklander’s infatuated tuition. She had been slashing idly at the daisies, now she made a complete backswing, and in a moment her husband was curled up on the bank with the imprint of her club on his temple. From that time on she became a murderess fighting down her panic and frantically engaged in the obliteration of evidence. The print of the golf-club was completely wiped out by her nightmare performance with the shooting-stick, which she had noticed on her way downhill. She tramped on the Colonel’s trout, and there was the print of her spiked heel on its hide. She grabbed up the trout and was frantic to get rid of it when she saw Mr. Phinn’s cat. One can imagine her watching to see if Thomasina would eat the fish and her relief when she found that she would. She had seen the Old ’Un on the bridge. No doubt she had heard at least the fortissimo passages of Phinn’s quarrel with the Colonel. Perhaps the Old ’Un would serve as false evidence. She fetched it and put it down by the body, but in handling the great trout, she let it brush against her skirt. Then she replaced the shooting-stick. Lady Lacklander’s paint-rag was folded under the strap of her rucksack. Kitty Cartarette’s hands were fishy. She used the rag to wipe them. Then, although she was about to thrust the shooting-stick back into the earth, she saw, probably round the collar of the spike, horrible traces of the use she had made of it. She twisted it madly about in the rag, which was, of course, already extensively stained with paint. No doubt she would have refolded the rag and replaced it, but she heard, may even have seen, Dr. Lacklander. She dropped the rag and bolted for cover. When she emerged, she found he had taken away all the painting gear.” Alleyn paused and rubbed his nose. “I wonder,” he said, “if it entered her head that Lady Lacklander might be implicated. I wonder exactly when she remembered that she herself was wearing Lady Lacklander’s shoes.”

He looked from Fox to Oliphant and the attentive Gripper.

“When she got home,” he said, “no doubt she at once bathed and changed. She put out her tweed skirt to go to the cleaners. Having attended very carefully to the heel, she then polished Lady Lacklander’s shoes. I think that heel must have worried her more than anything else. She guessed that Lacklander hadn’t told his mother he’d borrowed the shoes. As we saw this morning, she had no suitable shoes of her own, and her feet are much smaller than her stepdaughter’s. She drove herself over to Nunspardon this morning and instead of ringing, walked in and put the shoes in the downstairs cloakroom. I suppose Lady Lacklander’s maid believed her mistress to have worn them and accordingly packed them up with her clothes instead of the late Sir Harold’s boots which she had actually worn.”

Fox said, “When you asked for everybody’s clothes, Mrs. Cartarette remembered, of course, that her skirt would smell of fish.”

“Yes. She’d put it in the box for the dry cleaning. When she realized we might get hold of the skirt, she remembered the great trout brushing against it. With a mixture of bravado and cunning which is, I think, very characteristic, she boldly told me it would smell of fish and had the nerve and astuteness to use Thomasina as a sort of near-the-truth explanation. She only altered one fact. She said she tried to take a fish away from a cat, whereas she had given a fish to a cat. If she’d read her murdered husband’s book, she’d have known that particular cat wouldn’t jump, and the story was, in fact, a bit too fishy. The scales didn’t match.”

Oliphant said suddenly, “It’s a terrible thing to happen in the Vale. Terrible the things that’ll come out! How’s Sir George going to look?”

“He’s going to look remarkably foolish,” Alleyn said with some heat, “which is no more than he deserves. He’s behaved very badly, as his mother has no doubt pointed out to him. What’s more, he’s made things beastly and difficult for his son, who’s a good chap, and for Rose Cartarette, who’s a particularly nice child. I should say Sir George Lacklander has let his side down. Of course, he was no match at all for a woman of her hardihood; he’d have been safer with a puff-adder than with Kitty Cartarette, née, Heaven help her, de Vere.”