Ngaio Marsh - Death of a Peer

“But why!” Henry said. “Why did he kill him?”

“Because he knew he would come into £300 a year and a small property.”

“For so little!”

“Not so little to him. And I learnt that the property has increased considerably in value. He would have been comfortably set up for life. But there was another driving factor which we shall come to in a minute or two.”

“One moment,” said Henry. “Did Aunt V. know Giggle was the murderer?”

“We’ll take her next. As your family pointed out with tireless emphasis, Lady Wutherwood is mentally unhinged. May I say in passing that the emphasis was just a little too pointed? They would have been wiser to have left us to form our own opinion. However, she is undoubtedly insane and — a point that you may have missed — she is almost certainly taking some form of drug; morphia, I should think. She has also become deeply interested in witchcraft and black magic. The interest, I think, is pathological. In the police service we see a good deal of the effect of superstition on credulous and highly-strung people. We learn of middle-aged men and women losing their money and their sanity in the squalid little parlours of fortune-tellers, spirit-mongers, and self-styled psychiatrists. Lady Wutherwood, I think, is an extreme example of this sort of thing. She has wooed the supernatural in the grand macabre manner and has paid for her enthusiasm with her wits.”

“She’s always been a bit dotty,” said Henry.

“When Dr. Curtis and Fox and I interviewed her, we were puzzled by her reference to a couple of obscure mediaeval witches. A little later she certainly suggested that her husband had been killed by some supernatural agent who had taken the form of your brother Stephen.”

“Well!” said Henry. “I must say I call that a bit thick. Why pick on poor old Step?”

“Simply because she saw him in the lift. Her behaviour at this interview was in every way extraordinary. She had, we were assured, screamed violently and persistently when she discovered the injury to her husband, yet one couldn’t miss a kind of terrified exulting in her manner when she spoke of it. Lastly, and most importantly, she insisted that his body was to be sent to their London house. I’m no psychiatrist but it seemed to me that, however insane she was, if she had murdered her husband she wouldn’t desire, ardently, to spend a couple of nights in a half-deserted house with the dead body. Unless , and here’s an important point, she had some motive connected with the body. Very stupidly, I could think of no motive and was therefore still doubtful if she was guilty of her husband’s death, since Giggle’s guilt was not certainly known. This afternoon at Deepacres Park I believed I had discovered the motive. In a copy of a mediaeval work on witchcraft we found a chapter dealing with the various kinds of soporific spells.”

“My God!” Henry whispered, ‘“The Hand of Glory.”

“Yes. The hand cut from the wrist of a corpse, preferably a felon or a murdered man. It renders the possessor safe from discovery since — but you know your Ingoldsby Legends , I see.

Sleep all who sleep

Wake all who wake

But be as the dead for the dead man’s sake.

“That’s it. Lady Wutherwood determined to make the experiment. As soon as her copy of the Compendium Maleficomm opened itself at that chapter, as soon as I saw her pencilled marks in the margin, I guessed what was up. I ought to have guessed before.”

“I don’t see how you could,” said Roberta.

“Lord, no,” said Henry. “I call it quite remarkable to have got it when you did.”

“Do you?” said Alleyn. “I’m afraid you’re easily impressed. Well, there you are. She waited till the house was still and her night nurse was snoring. By the way, the night nurse’s virtuous denials may have some foundation. I fancy she’d been treated to a morphia tablet in her cocoa. You will have noticed that her pupils were contracted.”

“We didn’t,” said Henry. “But how cunning of Aunt V.”

“Oh, Lady Wutherwood didn’t do that,” said Alleyn, “any more than she murdered Giggle.”

Neither Henry nor Roberta spoke. Alleyn looked from one to the other and then at Nigel, who sat self-effacingly in a corner of the room. “Haven’t you told them?” asked Alleyn.

“I–I thought I had,” murmured Nigel.

“What have you told them?”

“I — that — well that Lady Wutherwood—”

“I left you with Fox. If you still held this remarkable theory surely you made certain, before you communicated it, that it was his idea too?”

“No,” stammered Nigel. “No. You said ‘she.’ How the devil—”

“You’ve seen the files. Who hid in the hall cupboard and listened to the quarrel between Lord Charles and his brother? Who lied about it and gave us a string of impossible moves? Who brought the lift back to the top landing after Giggle had done the job downstairs? You’ve seen Giggle’s body. What sort of murderer could inflict that sort of injury from behind the head of a victim lying on his right side in a bed by the left-hand wall of a room?”

“I — well. I—”

“A left-handed murderer to be sure. Tinkerton, you great gump, Tinkerton, Tinkerton, Tinkerton.”

Roberta was so deadly tired that she was not able to feel anything but a sort of dull astonishment and a sense of release. This was followed by the ironical reflection that once more the Lampreys, through no effort of their own, had got out of a scrape. They would not even have to face the distasteful ordeal of giving evidence against their uncle’s widow. She looked at Henry and wondered if she only imagined there was an unfamiliar glint of purpose in his eye, or if in sober truth the horrors of the last thirty hours had developed some latent possibilities in his character. He seemed to be listening intently to Alleyn. Roberta forced herself to listen too.

“… all we had to work on,” the pleasant voice was saying. “If she had done what she said she did, she would have met Baskett on his way from the hall or in the servants’ sitting-room. She told us she met nobody. She didn’t know, or had forgotten, that Baskett went down the passage while she was hiding in the hall cupboard. She heard Michael say good-bye to Giggle and remembered to fit that in with her story. But she told us that as she crossed the landing and followed Giggle downstairs she saw Lord Wutherwood sitting in the lift. You can’t see any one who sits in that lift. The doors were shut and the window in the outer door is too high. If Tinkerton was innocent, why did she tell those purposeless lies? Our theory is that Tinkerton, knowing that Lord Wutherwood meant to refuse his brother, left Nanny Burnaby in Flat 26, got as far as the hall door, found the hall full of the charade party and, as she told us, hung back until they went into the drawing-room, then joined Baskett for a glass of sherry, saw Cook in the kitchen and, leaving the kitchen ostensibly to wash her hands, went back to the hall and slipped into the open cupboard where she left impressions of her heels. She overheard the quarrel between your father and his brother. We have a detailed account of that quarrel from Miss Cora Blackburn.”

“Miserable little snooper,” said Henry. “You can’t open a door in that flat without finding Blackburn tiptoeing away on the other side.”

“A good many people overheard the interview,” Alleyn remarked.

“One up to you, sir,” said Henry.

“But Blackburn’s account happened to be the only one we felt inclined to believe.”

“Robin,” said Henry, “we have not distinguished ourselves, my darling. But why, Mr. Alleyn, did you reject our united;story (unhappily somewhat fanciful) in favour of a curious parlour-maid’s (probably correct)?”