Thou Shell of Death (22 page)

Had Edward Cavendish seen Nigel at that moment he would certainly have regretted the way he had caved in to the inspector. Nigel’s tow-coloured hair had fallen over his right eye, there was an angry glow on his high cheekbones, and in his eyes a merciless and eager ferocity. Edward had put himself contemptibly beyond the pale. There was no reason now why Edward should be spared, except Georgia’s own happiness; and it had now become a question of saving Georgia’s life, brother or no brother. Nigel suddenly had a clear vision of Edward running out ahead of him to the hut that morning. There was something in it crying out for explanation. Yes! By heaven! That was it. And to think that he had never noticed such an obvious point before.

The inspector was saying, ‘After that little conversation with Cavendish I had another look at those notes you made on the case. In the light of what Cavendish has told us, your case against his sister is very convincing, Mr Strangeways. The point you
made
, that she was the only person intimate enough with O’Brien for him to trust her with him when he was expecting an attack—that’s a very illuminating point indeed. Yes.’

‘I should have thought it would apply equally well to Lucilla Thrale. She had been intimate enough with him. And, by the way, Miss Cavendish told me about that poison this morning. She takes it with her on her expeditions, in case the worst comes to the worst. She was quite open about it.’

Blount scratched his chin and looked at Nigel shrewdly. ‘You seem to have altered your mind recently. Well, there’s no law against that. But I shall have to have a serious talk with Miss Cavendish. Perhaps she will tell me more than she told you,’ he added with ponderous irony. It fell rather flat on Nigel, whose mind was busy piecing together the rest of the evidence round that incredible glimpse of Edward running out ahead of him to the hut. More than ever now, it was necessary to dig out some more knowledge about O’Brien. He remembered the retired officer, Jimmy Hope, to whom Knott-Sloman had recommended him. Where did he live? Oh, yes, Staynton, near Bridgewest.

‘I want to borrow that car of O’Brien’s,’ he said. ‘Will it be all right?’

‘Certainly. What’s in your mind now?’

‘I hope to be able to tell you a pretty staggering story when I get back. Hold yourself in till then. And for God’s sake don’t go arresting Georgia Cavendish.
It’ll
only make you look silly when you have to release her again …’

An hour later Nigel was sitting in the untidy living room of a bungalow. Jimmy Hope was boiling water on a primus, hospitably insisting that he always made tea at four o’clock if any of the troops popped in. Jimmy Hope was a tall, bronzed man, active but nervous in his movements, and a little gone to seed. He was wearing a collarless shirt, a pullover, a pair of stained khaki riding breeches and thick woollen socks. He gave Nigel tea and some stale scones, pouring out a whisky for himself.

‘Rotguts,’ he said sardonically. ‘We had to take it in the War after a bit to get us off the ground, and now we’ve got the habit. The extraordinary thing about poor old Slip-Slop was that he never seemed to need it. Well, now, what d’you want to know? Whoever did him in deserves all that’s coming to him—and a sight more. He was the sort of fellow you simply can’t imagine dead. Though he did look pretty washed-out when I saw him last.’

‘Oh, you’ve met him lately, have you?’

‘Rather. He asked me over last August, just after he’d settled in at Chatcombe. Looked like death, I thought, but he was in rare good form. Said he was just making a will and was giving half his money to the foundation of a fund for the painless extinction of staff officers. ’S a matter of fact, he asked me to witness the will.’

‘Did he really? There’s been quite a to-do about that will. You and Bellamy were the witnesses, then?’

‘No, not Bellamy. A sour-faced woman: his cook, I think she was.’

Nigel digested this intractable morsel in silence. It eliminated the obvious reason for the attack on Bellamy: they should have realised before, though, that O’Brien would almost certainly leave him a legacy and therefore he would not witness the will. Then the murder of O’Brien very likely had nothing to do with the will either. Moreover, there was the singular fact that, although Bleakley had presumably asked her, Mrs Grant had not mentioned that she had been a witness.

‘I suppose O’Brien didn’t tell you what he was going to do with the will? Send it to his solicitors, or what?’

‘No, he didn’t. How are you fellows getting on? Hot on the trail? Or oughtn’t one to ask?’

‘Well, we’re making progress of a sort. The trouble at the moment is that we can’t fmd out anything about O’Brien before he joined up.’

‘You’ll be lucky if you ever do. We never did. He and a young chap called Fear were posted to the flight I was in, late ’15, if I remember right. Absolute David and Jonathan they were. I suspect they both joined up under age. Fear was an Irishman, too—came from Wexford—good family, and all that. Used to tell us all about his parents and the Big House, and so on. The only thing he wouldn’t say a word about was O’Brien.
We
asked him often enough, because O’Brien never gave us any change, but he wasn’t saying anything. In the end we gave up trying to find out. Someone started the usual rumour that O’Brien had had to leave the country in a hurry—taken a potshot at some bloke he didn’t like from behind a hedge, in the good old Hibernian way, and we left it at that. Wouldn’t be surprised myself if it was true, judging from the way he used to lay for the Huns. A holy terror he was—didn’t care two hoots what happened to himself as long as he brought his man down.’

‘Was he like that from the beginning?’ asked Nigel.

‘Funny you should ask that. He wasn’t. Mind you, he was a genius in the air from the beginning. But quite reasonably careful at first. Then, after he’d been out a week or so, he suddenly asked for leave. Never seen anyone in such a stew. Moved heaven and earth to get it. But it was no good. Fritz was all over us in the air just then, and all leave had been stopped. O’Brien went about like a lost soul for a fortnight. Then one morning I came into the mess. He and young Fear were reading a letter. They both looked as if they had hit the side of a mountain. It was after this that O’Brien went crazy. He’d attack anything. Trying to get himself killed, none of us had the least doubt about it. But he was such a bloody wonder with a plane that he simply couldn’t bring it off. It was the other fellow that went down every time. Honestly, we got a bit
afraid
of him. He went about with a look in his eyes like a ghost out of hell.’

‘What happened to Fear?’

‘He was a damned good flyer, too. But he wouldn’t have survived as long as he did without O’Brien. O’Brien used to look after him like a mother up in the air. Fear got quite peeved with him at times about it; said he could look after himself. But when they were separated he was killed soon enough.’

‘How was that?’

‘They both got flights. I’d come home with a blighty by then, and only heard about it later. Fear was shot down leading his flight in a ground-strafe, late in ’seventeen, I think it was. O’Brien lost the whole of his flight the same week, in the same sector, I believe. Ruddy murder it was. They say that after Fear got his packet O’Brien spent all his spare time dropping out of the clouds on the wretched Huns. They thought he was possessed by seven devils.’

‘Well, I must be getting along. Thanks awfully for the information,’ Nigel said.

‘Afraid I’ve not been much use. Once I get yarning away I can’t stop. Have a spot before you go. No? Well, cheerio. Look me up some time when you’ve finished your sleuthing. A fellow gets pretty lonely with nothing but hens to talk to.’

Nigel drove back very fast to Chatcombe. The interview with Jimmy Hope had thrown little new light on O’Brien, but it had cleared away most of the complications about the will. Nigel tried to fit in this
discovery
with the framework of the case that was slowly growing up in his mind. Yes, it unquestionably did fit. He pressed exultantly on the accelerator and scattered a flock of geese. Then the word ‘Wexford’ came into his mind. O’Brien had joined up in company with a young man from Wexford—a young man whose parents lived in a Big House. Edward Cavendish had visited some big house in Wexford every summer before the War, Georgia had said. He had fallen in love, she thought, with a girl there. So there
was
a link between the prewar O’Brien and the prewar Cavendish. Was it purely a geographical one? Neither Cavendish nor O’Brien admitted having met each other before they were introduced by Georgia. He must go over to that place—what was it called?—Meynart House, at once. If it proved that Cavendish and O’Brien had not met there, it would be a wild-goose chase. If they
had
—well, he might get down to some rock-bottom motive for O’Brien’s murder; and, even if he didn’t, the fact that Cavendish had pretended not to have met O’Brien before would be suspicious enough.

Arrived back at Chatcombe, he found Inspector Blount and a telephone message awaiting him. The latter said that Lady Marlinworth would be glad if he would step over to the Towers as soon as he found it convenient, since she had an important piece of news for him. The inspector said that the post-mortem report had come in: Knott-Sloman had been killed by swallowing sixty grains of the anhydrous hydrocyanic acid. He had probably died in ten to fifteen minutes—
but
that had now become irrelevant. It was perhaps a little strange that so neat and tidy a murderer, Blount said grimly, should have apparently made no attempt to remove the pieces of the doctored nut. Still, the risk was probably not worth his while. Nigel told Blount what he had discovered about the will. Bleakley had just been having a conference with the inspector, so they routed him out and asked him had Mrs Grant ever been interrogated on this subject. She had, he said, and had told him she knew nothing whatever about the will. Blount at once went off to ginger up her memory. Nigel said he was going over to his uncle’s house. Bleakley asked if he might go over with him. He was a shade disgruntled, because Blount had hinted that there might have been more interrogation of Lord and Lady Marlinworth, considering that they had been at dinner with O’Brien only a few hours before he was murdered. The superintendent took this amiss, not so much as an insinuation against his own efficiency as a lack of respect—amounting almost to blasphemy—for the landed gentry.

On their way out Nigel saw Georgia in the lounge. He lingered for a moment to ask her how she had got on with Inspector Blount. But, before he had time to open his mouth, she said, in tones that were doubly heart-rending because they held no trace of reproach or self-pity:

‘I didn’t think you would have to tell them about the poison.’

It was said in a small, matter-of-fact voice, with just the faintest accentuation of the ‘you’ to twist the blade round in the wound. Nigel had often rehearsed in fantasy a situation such as this. How often had his patience not been galled by books, plays and films in which hero and heroine protract an idiotic misunderstanding into chapters or acts or reels of wooden standoffishness, just for lack of the few words of obvious explanation at the beginning. If, he had said to himself dozens of times, I should ever find myself in such a theatrical situation, which God forbid, I should of course clear up the misunderstanding at once, like any other normal sensible person. It was therefore doubly aggravating to find now that his tongue simply couldn’t form the correct words. ‘Go on, go on,’ whispered his enlightened self, ‘tell her you didn’t give her away over the poison. There’s no point being high horse and chivalrous, anyway—she’ll find out the truth soon enough.’ But some unpredictable force had arisen in him, arguing with dull obstinacy. ‘I refuse to be the person to tell her that she was betrayed by her brother. It’s no good. I refuse.’ Furious with this obstinate saboteur, Nigel yet found himself outside the room again without having said a word. Another triumph of savagery over civilised reason, he exclaimed to himself bitterly.

It was dark by the time he and Bleakley stood outside the front door of Chatcombe Towers. The butler let them in, nicely grading his reception to their respective social stations, Nigel being accorded the
tepid
affability due to a gentleman, while Bleakley, who was only a person, received a welcome without the chill off. They were then ushered into the drawing room, where Lord and Lady Marlinworth were sitting. This room was a veritable jungle of heirlooms, and an admirable setting for Lady Marlinworth, who, in spite of her age, had lost none of her agility in climbing up and down family trees. Here every development of aristocratic taste could be seen as clearly as strata on a geological section. Eighteenth-century pieces swooned elegantly, confronted by the brassy, assured stare of Victorian lumber. Layers of relatives, supercilious in gold frames or self-righteous in plush, made a commendable attempt to conceal totally the Edwardian wallpaper, whose scarlet and purple and orange writhings would have surprised even a veteran of delirium tremens. The visitor who, unnerved by the inhuman and popeyed glare of a platoon of bemedalled ancestors, sought to escape to another part of the room, would find himself hemmed in by archipelagoes of small tables crowded with the miscellaneous loot that these same military gentlemen had brought back from their foreign service. Lady Marlinworth was very proud of her room. Her husband by long practice had learnt to thread his way through its mazes. It was haunted by the faintest sandalwood and lavender perfume: also, perhaps, by the ghosts of generations of domestics, whose lives had been appreciably shortened by the dusting of it.

Lady Marlinworth received Nigel with composed pleasure. Superintendent Bleakley, whom she had instantly summed up as one of the lower orders but quite respectable, she addressed with cooing condescension. Her husband surveyed Bleakley, his well-bred but faded look giving him a marked resemblance to his great-grandfather’s Derby winner, that hung on the wall behind him surrounded by a painted coat of arms, a heavily framed picture in oils which had originally represented the Relief of Lucknow, but now suggested a square of homemade toffee, a Whistler, and a photograph of some young women playing croquet—apparently at midnight in a churchyard.