Thou Shell of Death (11 page)

‘Stop, stop, stop!’ cried Nigel, clapping his hands to his ears in mock desperation. ‘I can’t stand more than one motive at a time, and you’ve already given me three. Edward Cavendish might have killed O’Brien because (
a
) he’d taken away his girl, or (
b
) he wanted to expedite his legacy, or both; Lucilla might have killed him on the hell-has-no-fury-like-a-womans-corned cue. It only needs you to tell me that Georgia is O’Brien’s cast-off mistress and Knott-Sloman an agent of the OGPU and we shall have a perfect case against everyone in the household. Oh, I’d forgotten Mrs Grant. Her motive could be religious mania.’

‘What about me? It’s rather humiliating to be left out like this. I’ve always fancied myself as a potential murderer. The trained mind applying itself to the
practical
problems of life, you know.’ Starling’s face wore its most irresponsible and babyish expression, but his eyes were sharp; he looked like an overgrown infant prodigy.

‘I should head the list of suspects with your name, Philip, only that I can’t conceive any possible motive for you.’

‘No. If I had felt the need to bump off anyone in this outfit, my dear Nigel, it would have been Knott-Sloman. A really squalid fellow. Was a brass-hat in the war and runs a roadhouse in the peace, and if you can tell me a more nauseating combination of activities I’ll eat my hat. Add to that the fact that he is an anecdote-addict and eats nuts between meals, and Dante would have had to think out a special circle of hell for him. Woof!’

‘Where’s his roadhouse?’

‘Near London. Kingston bypass or somewhere. Very posh and popular. He’s just the sort of fellow to make a success of a thing like that. Smacks the women on the bottom and wears all his medals on his dinner-jacket, no doubt.’

‘I wonder how O‘Brien came to take up with him.’

‘You may well ask, old boy. Blackmail, probably. Sloman and Lucy are suspected by the cognoscenti of working in partnership over something or other, and blackmail would be just about his mark.’

‘Ah,’ said Nigel ironically, ‘I was waiting for something like that. Now you’ve only to give me a
nice
, succulent motive for Georgia, and I shall be quite happy.’

‘No, no. I yield to no one in my love of scandal for scandal’s sake. But Georgia is a good stick. Everything that a woman should be—attractively ugly, eccentric without being a frump, witty, a good cook, sensible and sensual, faithful, and a perfect seat—I am told—on anything from an armadillo to a camel.’

‘She’s everything, in fact, except a thumping great blonde,’ said Nigel maliciously.

‘Everything, as you say, except a thumping great blonde. Not that I wouldn’t have made an exception to my rule, and applied for the job; only she was booked. O’Brien, you know. Yes. He was very fond of her, and she was right in the deep end over him—wouldn’t look at anyone else. Can’t think why they didn’t get spliced.’

‘That’s what you meant when you said she was faithful?’

‘And to her brother, too. He must be ten years older, but she looks after him like an only son. The only time I’ve seen her fussy was at some party or other when he threw a faint. You’d think the end of the world had come, the way she behaved. Oh, yes, she dotes on Edward. God knows why. He’s quite a decent old trot, but definitely in the Beta class.’

‘I thought he seemed to have brains.’

‘He has, of a sort—the financier’s type of brain. Enough to make a fortune, but not enough to leave well alone when it’s made. Georgia is going to have
her
hands pretty full with him in the near future. Fellow’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown already. He’s been going about all this morning with a long face and twitching hands. Gives you the pip to look at him. Heaven knows Oxford is a neurotic enough place to work in, but it must be lotus-land compared with the Stock Exchange.’

‘How are the other inmates reacting?’

‘Well, Lucilla’s standing about in a series of funeral urn poses: positively reeks of tragedy—a widow bird sat mourning for her love, “widow” being the courtesy title and “bird” the courtesan one. I really believe the girl is a bit upset about something; she never did have the talent to put up such a good act. Knott-Sloman, thank God, has been out of the house most of the time, and comparatively silent when he was in it—the atmosphere is not a favourable one for the bottom-slapping
raconteur
. Poor Georgia has been wandering about most of the time looking like the ghost of an organ grinder’s monkey. It’s really more than I can bear to look at her—makes me want to weep buckets. In spite of it, she’s the sheet-anchor of the party: a ministering angel to Edward, and a trained nurse for Lucilla—and that must be a pretty grinding job, considering the way Lucy groans and bays and sniffles all the time about her broken heart and her dead hero, as though Georgia’s heart wasn’t ten times as big and fifty times more broken.’

The little don was quite flushed with his generous denunciation.

‘Yes,’ said Nigel, ‘the real broken heart does not advertise itself’

‘Is not puffed up.’

‘Neither vaunteth itself unseemly,’ replied Nigel antiphonally. ‘However,’ he continued, ‘there is a time to play quotation-games and a time to refrain from playing quotation-games. Will you please, Philip, instead of searching the Scriptures, apply the trained mind to another practical problem? To wit, how does a chap go fifty yards over snow an inch deep without leaving tracks?’

‘Faith, old boy, faith. Levitation. Fellow’s a yogi. Or possibly used stilts.’

‘Stilts?’ said Nigel with sudden excitement. ‘But no, that won’t do. They would leave marks, too, and Bleakley has been all over the ground; he’d have noticed them. I wonder, now, what sort of impressions snowshoes make. Visible, anyway, I should think. It must be something ludicrously simple.’

‘If you were to give me the context, I should have less difficulty in determining the correct reading,’ said Starling donnishly. ‘I thought there were a perfectly good set of footprints.’

‘Going the wrong way, unfortunately. Unless the murderer found himself all of a sudden through the looking-glass and had to walk away from the house to get to it.’

Philip Starling’s face took on its most infuriating infant-innocence expression. ‘And that, in a sense, is just what he did. Your Greek compositions, Nigel,
admirable
as they often were, suffered from over-elaboration. Straining after style, you were apt to make elementary mistakes. Blind spots, you called them—’

‘Oh, heaven,’ Nigel interrupted, ‘I never thought I should have to undergo another tutorial.’

Starling continued imperturbably. ‘Now if you’d not spent all your time at your private school inking your fingernails, and at Oxford drinking coffee in some low dive, you would have come across the adventures of Hercules. The little affair of the Cacus and the oxen, for instance.’

Nigel buried his face in his hands and groaned bitterly. ‘I shall have to take to rabbit breeding,’ he moaned.

‘Cacus,’ the don went on mercilessly, ‘as every schoolboy knows, stole some oxen. Hercules, the Bulldog Drummond of the period, went to recover them. Cacus, showing remarkable intelligence for one of such abnormally overgrown physique, dragged the oxen backwards by their tails into a cave. Impression made on Hercules’ mind—which incidentally was about on a par with Drummond’s for low cunning, obtuseness, greed, humourlessness, cruelty and bestial arrogance—was that the oxen had gone in the opposite direction.’

‘All right, all right,’ groaned Nigel. ‘Don’t rub it in. I’ve made the world’s most childish howler. But, by Jove, this alters the complexion of everything. X walked backwards into the house; that’s why the
toemarks
were deeper than the heel. But there were no other tracks. Therefore he went out before there was enough snow to take an impression—between twelve-five and twelve-thirty, say. He’s going to get a nasty jar when he finds we know that.’

They talked for nearly an hour more, until the winter evening was darkening into night and the image of buttered toast loomed large in the mind. Starling had begun to say:

‘By the way, Nigel, I suppose you noticed at dinner how O’Brien—’

When he was interrupted by a commotion downstairs. A woman’s voice gave a stifled shriek; feet could be heard running fast somewhere; a long silence; then someone was calling out, ‘Mr Strangeways! Mr Strangeways!’ and footsteps were pounding up the stairs. Whatever O’Brien had said or done at dinner was not to be recounted just now. Nigel opened his door. Bolter was outside, mopping his brow, his red face working with excitement.

‘The super wants you, zur,’ he said. ‘Mrs Grant found un in the pantry—she went to get the victuals for tea—his skull be nearly zplit oapen. A ghaastlee zight ’e be, zur.’

‘Good lord, the super laid out now; not dead, is he?’

‘You mistake my meaning, zur. Bain’t the super. ’Tis that man of Mr O’Brien’s—what’s his name?—ar, Bellamy. Bellamy it be, zur. In a pool of blood.’

VII

TELLTALE

ARTHUR BELLAMY’S RENDEZVOUS
with the murderer had taken place sooner than he had expected. Not that he could have known much about it. He had been struck down from behind, in the passage that led from the main part of the house towards the kitchen and scullery. It was a dark passage, so that, even if the blow had been struck some hours earlier, he might very well not have seen his assailant. There was blood on the stone floor just on the far side of the swing-door that divided the servants’ quarters from the rest of the house; from there, smears and spots of blood pointed a clear trail along the passage to the pantry door: no attempt had been made to clean them up: they and the pool of blood on the pantry floor were still wet. Superintendent Bleakley had little difficulty in reconstructing the deed. The assailant had either followed Bellamy into the kitchen passage or been in hiding behind the swing-door which opened into it; probably the latter. He had struck him with some weapon which was yet to be found. He had then taken hold of his victim, presumably by the heels—for to
take
him by the shoulders would have been impossible without getting blood on to one’s clothes—dragged him along into the pantry, let the body slump on to the floor, closed the door, and—Bleakley added—congratulated himself or herself on a neat little job. The superintendent knew the body had been dragged, not carried, by the clear trail it had left on the rather dusty floor of the passage.

Unfortunately, that seemed likely to be the sum of his knowledge for the present. The person who might have been expected to know something about it, Mrs Grant, had been taking her usual afternoon nap in her bedroom: and, as she made it quite clear, she always slept the sleep of the righteous. Nigel doubted, in fact, whether she would have curtailed her legitimate period of sleep even for the Judgement-day trumpets: she seemed more concerned with the mess that had been made in her pantry than with the fate of Arthur Bellamy. This still hung in the balance, and would hang for an indefinite time. He was still breathing when they found him. The local doctor, hastily summoned, declared that there might be a chance of saving his life. The superintendent, for obvious reasons, wanted him conveyed to the safety of a hospital; but the doctor refused to be responsible for the results of moving him so far in his present condition. After some argument, Bleakley gave in. Bellamy was taken up into his own bedroom: a policeman was stationed at the door, with orders not to admit anyone except the doctor or the
superintendent
, under any circumstances whatsoever, and a trained nurse sent for.

While some of his men were searching the kitchen quarters, the outbuildings and the grounds for the weapon, Bleakley herded the guests into the dining room, preparatory to beginning his inquiry. He first asked whether any of them objected to their private rooms being searched. He would be able to obtain a search warrant, of course; but time, in a case like this, might prove important; and as none of them could possibly have anything to conceal, etc., etc. The superintendent was a different man from the homely, puzzled individual who had talked with Nigel in the hut only a few hours before. Thought removed from the sphere of action meant little to him; but now, with all the familiar detail of action about him, he showed himself to possess a mind lucid and orderly, and the personal dignity of one who is working single-mindedly towards a definite goal. Nigel had had a few words with him before the inquiry started. ‘Well, this looks like clearing things up a bit,’ he said.

‘That’s right, sir. I thought I’d made a fool of myself this morning, letting out that I was interested in that will. But it’s brought our man out into the open, and a darned sight sooner than I should have imagined. Only hope it’s not done for Bellamy.’

‘You mean, it suggests that Arthur Bellamy was one of the two witnesses to the will.’

‘Exactly, sir. And if he was, he’ll know who the other witness was and possibly the provisions of the
will
, too. The murderer took the will, knowing that its contents would prove motive against him.’

‘Getting it out of the safe how?’ Nigel interrupted.

‘Must have known the combination, sir; means it was one of Mr O’Brien’s intimate friends, and that fits in with everything we’ve got so far.’

‘H’m. It would not be impossible to pick holes in that. Still, go on.’

‘Well, assuming the murderer does not want the contents of this will’—at the word ‘this’ Nigel nodded vigorously with sudden comprehension—‘divulged yet, or ever maybe, it would be natural for him to try and finish off Bellamy. His knowing that Bellamy was one of the witnesses suggests that he was the other.’

‘But does not necessarily imply it. We must remember, too, that a witness to a will cannot benefit by it. Therefore, if this murder was done in order to obtain money under the will, the murderer cannot have been a witness.’

‘Well, sir, if the murderer was not one of the witnesses but knows who the other was—and there’d be no use his killing Bellamy if he didn’t—then that other witness is going to be for it in the near future, if we don’t look out.’